The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

I rated this book 10/10...

Taking its title from 17th-century haiku poet Basho's travel journal, The Narrow Road To The Deep North is about the impossibility of love. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943. As the day builds to its horrific climax, Dorrigo Evans battles and fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs, a man is killed for no reason, and a love story unfolds. 

Richard Flanagan, weaving together the personal and professional life of Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans, brings us a dark and touching insight into the horrors of the Burma Death Railway.

Written in the style of a war hero reminiscing about his past, Dorrigo finds himself in the midst of the second world war, caught up in a forbidden affair with his uncle’s headstrong wife. He visits her rather than his own fiancee whenever he has leave, and begins to become absorbed in his love for Amy above most other things. The novel takes a dramatic turn when two years later Dorrigo is captured by the Japanese as a Prisoner of War working on the Burma Death Railway. He is expected to lead a large group of fellow prisoners as they work on building the railway to impossible deadlines and in impossible conditions. Dorrigo is forced to get ever more work out of his fellow captives, even as they are dying around him of exhaustion, starvation and cholera; and he finds himself setting up and running a makeshift hospital for the camp alongside his other duties to his men.

Flanagan writes with a beauty that brings the horrors of the POW camp and the characters that suffer there to life. There are many symbolic gestures laced throughout the narrative - handwritten letters, red camellias and pencil sketches that resonate long after the book has finished, and the link to poetry from the start brings endless depth to the prose. The grit and gore of the Prisoner of War camp is followed by severe emptiness as Flanagan explores the emotions of both the prisoners and the Japanese soldiers after the war is over. Here he expertly sets out the contrast between the two lives - when the men begin to realise that nothing they ever experience will be as intense or meaningful again.

Flanagan’s novel becomes all the more poignant when we find out that it was written in tribute to his father, an Australian prisoner of war who survived his experiences on the Burma Death Railway. His father sadly passed away on the day that Flanagan finished writing his book.

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ was well deserving of the Man Booker Prize last year and is now out in paperback, although there is something quite pleasing about the hardback edition.