The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Richard Flanagan Paperback – 26 Mar. 2015

This is a book which at times I struggled with - a hard book, but for all the right reasons, as it is confrontational, shakes the reader awake, out of complacency and denialI read this book at times as if grasping at mist. It is `everything' filled both with a sense of the utter, pointless indifference and suffering of existence and the flips, almost on a knife edge, into `peak experience' super reality, deep meaning, which vanishes as we grasp at recognising it.A book which leaves the reader (well this reader) all shook up, spread-eagled and exhausted by the whole complex STUFF of living, wondering at times whether they can bear to continue reading - or bear to stop reading. If you think `what on earth is this reviewer going on about' - well, in part that IS what the book is like, as it follows the story, flipping back and forth over a period of some fifty years, in the life of Dorrigo Evans, a Tasmanian, an Army doctor, caught up in World War 2, captured by the Japanese, and a POW involved in the brutal building of the Burma railway for the glory of JapanThe structure of the novel flips over and over between Dorrigo in his 70s, the young Dorrigo, in his 20's, recently enlisted, undergoing training in Australia, then, slightly later, that intolerable, impossible experience as a POW. The `old' Dorrigo of course is at the same time those younger versions, in the way we are always living our present lives backwards, since the place we are always contains the places we have been. He, like all of us, tries to find the story which explains him to himself.This book is certainly not for the faint-hearted, or indeed those with weak stomachs. There are scorching descriptions of atrocities, the terrible effects of starvation and disease, and the implacable brutality our species can visit upon each other - and, indeed upon anything at all.What Flanagan achieves however is to prevent easy demonising - we see, time and again, the weak and the petty achieve moments of humanity - and even those we easily dismiss as monsters are made sense of. Devotion to ideals can damn us all as surely as it can raise and refine us. Even the heroes are more complex, and, in day to day life, sometimes more cruel than we might need them to be.Parallel to the stories of nations and individuals representing those nations and their ideals, the `isms' through which a wider society gets shaped, and shapes us, are the more personal ideals we may live by. Dorrigo Evans carries both these aspects, that of the world stage, and that of the private and personal myth and story.Shortly before being catapulted into the war Evans was involved in a scorching, overwhelming encounter with Amy, his uncle's wife, and one of the themes of the book is the cataclysmic effect of love - or lust, and the confusion between the two - to shape a life, the idea of love as a guiding star, which may be as destructive - or constructive - as devotion to an ideal.It is a stunningly written book, horrific, beautiful and troubling, as hewn out of elemental stuff as Greek Tragedy, reminding me of how raw and transformative literature can be, when it engages with our deep need to make sense of our time here.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is bleak, brutal, disturbing and powerful. Yet somehow it is beautifully written, particularly the way the love affair with his uncle's wife plays on the mind of Dorrigo Evans throughout his years as a prisoner-of-war and its aftermath. The scenes which take place in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on the Burma Death Railway where Evans was an army surgeon were harrowing to say the least. The treatment of the prisoners-of-war and their suffering was horrific and it was difficult to read about what happened to these characters who you had come to care about.I'm not sure I could exactly say I enjoyed reading this book, given the difficult subject matter, but it's certainly a book I won't forget. I can see why it won the Booker prize and I am glad I read it.

Undoubtedly this book deserves the Booker Prize. I did not find it an easy read, if you want to be uplifted, entertained or have your faith in humanity affirmed this is not for you.Split into three distinct phases told in a non-linear way this book jumps back and forward between the run-up to the war, the war itself and its aftermath. The main protagonist, Dorrigo Evans, is a morally troubled army surgeon from Australia who spent most of the war as the commanding officer for several hundred POWs held by the Japanese Imperial Army and put to work on constructing the Burmese Railway in modern day Thailand (Siam). Dorrigo is undoubtedly a flawed man, who is deeply embarrassed by the regard he is held in as a war hero, he deserves a higher opinion of himself.The part in POW camp was always going to be rough but what makes this a hard read is that it fully exposes the full horror of these events and the aftermath with no attempt to add a bit of uplift, justice or closure.The pace of the book is slow and detailed. Some events were spread across several chapters that used different points of view to fully explore the horror. I just wanted these narratives to end. The tragic endings were clear from the start. I want the victims' pain, and mine, to end quickly, the re-examination made it almost unbearable, which is exactly how these events should be described.Whether you like, admire or are inspired by this book depends on how much you want to immerse yourself in the tragic injustice of the POWs during and after the war.There are moments of beauty. The camaraderie in particular shows the positive qualities of the POWs, in some senses this makes it even harder, they all deserved better than they got after the war.The writer makes no attempt to spare the feelings of the reader and offers no light relief. The subject matter deserves this honesty and it is a great book. The fact it is such a hard read is a mark of its greatness, I hope I never read it again.