richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north

Yet on the Line, 'violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created'. They are all dying, but empowered to remain on the right side of death's margin by Dorrigo's determination to make his despair carry the face of 'purpose and certainty'. Because, thought Dorrigo Evans, the real number was zero.' His men are quintessential young Australians, all with names appropriate to Antipodean spaces – Rooster MacNeice, Darky Gardiner, Sheephead Morton, Bonox Baker, Lizard Brancusi, Chum Fahey. But, 'three hundred and sixty-three was not the real number.

He reports to Nakamura the number – out of his original thousand – still capable of work. Dorrigo, now the leader of a thousand-strong group of fevered and ulcerated men, stands before him, defiant, 'a weak man whom the thousand were forming into the shape of their expectations of him as a strong man'. The narrative advances: when we meet the Japanese commander of the Thai railway camp, Nakamura, ridden with jungle ticks and dependent on methamphetamine, we realise that he too is a prisoner of the project. The fact that Amy is married to his uncle would be clunky in other hands, but is utterly convincing here. The affair is somehow permissible because 'the war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused'. He is elevated to medicine as a scholarship boy, and, in a splendid set piece in an Adelaide bookshop, Dorrigo, now a military surgeon, meets a small-framed, gleaming-eyed and galvanising woman named Amy. Innocent of electricity, his family 'slept under skins of possums they snared'. Dorrigo's boyhood took place far from the grief and benefits of the big world, however. By his middle years he is a national figure – his own face staring back at him 'from charity letterheads to memorial coins'. His Australian protagonist is a surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, who to his own amazement becomes legendary in postwar Australia for his wartime courage in the face of Japanese captors. Let me say, though, that his book ranges far in time and human fascination beyond that central and barbarous piece of engineering.

His father was an Australian prisoner of war on the infamous 'narrow road', and the railway ran through his childhood, too. R ichard Flanagan, the Tasmanian writer acclaimed for such novels as Death of a River Guide and Gould's Book of Fish, has a right to focus on the so-called Burma railway, built with forced labour by the Japanese in the second world war.

Richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north