The Narrow Road to the Deep North

If you like a light read, do not pick up this book.... It might, it will, it should disturb you.

We have come at a time where very few survivors are still around to tell their story. Meanwhile, it seems far enough away so that we can look at situations from the perspective of both parties involved. Flanagan's writing makes the horrors of the WW2 POW camps come closer than you might feel comfortable with. I put down the book regularly while reading, but I always picke it back up again. This book definitely deserved the Man Booker Prize, in my humble opinion

Given the glowing reviews and awards bestowed on this book I was really surprised how poor this book is. It's amazing how this book makes a very interesting and emotional subject boring, disjointed and cold. Very dissapointing.

This novel took me months to read. Not because it was at all boring, but because I felt that I had to savour it. I had to read it in instalments to properly understand it. At times, I did consider giving up, but something always drew me back in. That something was Richard Flanagan's writing.

There were times when a sentence or paragraph would cause me to catch my breath. I had to put the book down and stare at the wall while I contemplated what he said and how he said it.

The book also took me a long time to get through because there are some seriously horrific scenes to take in - Systematic beheadings of Chinese POW's; vivisections of live US airman; the daily torture and living conditions of the Australian POW's. I needed to build my nerve and strength before plunging into the horror of war again.

POSSIBLE SPOILER: I didn't always like Dorrigo Evans – at least – I liked Dorrigo Evans the doctor and during his time in the war, but Dorrigo Evans the husband – not so much (probably due to the fact he was a serial adulterer – and I admit I am quite judgemental about adulterers). I know men returned from the war as shells of their former selves, but the fact that he felt like he had to sleep with other women to validate his love for Amy really annoyed me. Yet at the end he redeemed himself as a husband and father.

The characters I fell for in this book were the ones on the periphery: Darky Gardiner, Tiny, even the old Greek owner of Nikitaris's Fish and Chip shop. I loved reading about them.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a beautifully written, haunting read. It weaves the horrors of war together with its disastrous aftereffects. I am glad I stayed with it – even if it took three months.

The reader was good and the story detailed and absorbing but it was incredibly depressing.

There's no doubt this book will be on my Best Books of the Year list. It will also go on my Best Books Ever Read list. But I don't think I will ever reread it; it was a deeply emotional read.

What is the story? The plot has a huge timeframe, with the book spanning the childhood to old age of a man who served in World War II as an officer in the Australian military, and the story centers on the time the officer spent in a Japanese POW camp while his fellow soldiers were forced to build a railroad through the jungle in horrific conditions. The author is amazingly able to assume the point-of-view of not only the main character, Dorrigo, but also Dorrigo's fellow soldiers, his on-the-sly girlfriend, his girlfriend's husband, his wife, and even his tormentors in the Japanese POW camp. The author did this so well that I was able to empathize with an Australian soldier while he is being beaten to death, as well as the Japanese officer allowing the Australian to be beaten, and that is astonishing.

The experiences of all of the people in the story were appalling because of the impossibility of the situations; no one could take action without having both bad and good results.

Isn't that real life, pushed to the extreme, of course?

What I had suspected to be its apparent weakness turned out to be its spirit by the time the book approached its ending. For all the myriad images of life's many ironies, there is a seething intended unemotionality with which Flanagan goes about describing, narrating, and weaving the tales around characters that come alive as and when they give themselves up in the face of their daunting lives one by one.
With themes of loneliness and its likeliness in life amidst the great hopes and expectations that human beings harbor in their minds, only to gradually fleet away as unfulfilled feelings, the author spans through lives that are connected by suffering on the Burma Death Railway and beyond.
In not attempting to pretend and find explanation for why the world is as it is or isn't, the book is able to illuminate more moments of the palpable human space with a strangely aloof but rooted sincerity of observation:
“It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words – all the words that did not say things directly – were for him the most truthful”.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is able to portray human nature in its raw and complex form; through a manifestation of a spectrum of choices, actions and responses grounded within domains of love and war. The incessant being of being painfully human, in more pain than otherwise, is deftly stringed by the author in a stream-of-sorely-poetic-consciousness:
“When he was away from her he tried remembering more of her perfect imperfections”.
Flanagan ensures that his characters remain flawed; the imperfections manifesting in an abundance of words, and gestures. He would rather not endorse you to really like or dislike anyone. That's one thing I have the taste of in my mouth after leaving the text. For a large part, as a reader, I found myself on a narrow road which eventually led my mind to a deep north, or a deep somewhere.
Post-reading, the surprisingly abstract title of the book got its pulse to start beating; it gradually
settled within the structure of ironies and paradox of remembrances and forgetting. The poetic warmth of haikus with which the timelessness of time is treated around the unbearable physical pain and drudgery of war is one of the glimpses the narration portrays:
“Days and months are travellers of eternity, he read. So too the years that pass by.”
Ultimately, however, the book is about the strange milieu humans are made up of; and their heart that is sinewed with what is fragile and yet what is stoically strong like an endlessly enduring quest.