the narrow road to the deep north by richard flanagan

His narrow road is a railway, and he labors too under a different compulsion, one that takes the shape of the Japanese Army. well, that’s another question entirely.įlanagan’s Dorrigo Evans, a young medical officer, seems at first to travel a different path. Whether that journey has any meaning, whether there’s anything beyond putting one foot in front of the other. Basho walks because he must, and in reading him the old cliché comes alive: Life is a journey.

Yet his walk was marked by moments of terrible loneliness, and he seemed to travel under a kind of compulsion, without a defined goal or purpose. Basho went north from present-day Tokyo through a mountainous land of often shattering beauty. 50,000-copy first printing.The title of Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel comes from a 17th-century Japanese classic, a little book by the poet Basho that mixes a prose travel narrative with haiku in its account of a long journey on foot. Pellucid, epic, and sincerely touching in its treatment of death, this is a powerful novel. Yet it is Dorrigo's Japanese adversary, Major Nakamura, Flanagan's most conflicted and fully realized character, whose view of the war and struggles with the Emperor's will and his own postwar fate comes to overshadow Dorrigo's story, especially in the novel's bracing second half. While Amy, with the rest of the world, believes him dead, Dorrigo's only respite comes from the friends he tries to keep healthy and sane, fellow sufferers such as Darky Gardiner, Lizard Brancussi, and Rooster MacNiece.

Most of the novel recounts Dorrigo's experience as a POW in the Burmese jungle on the 'speedo,' horrific work sessions on the 'Death Railway' that leave most of his friends dead from dysentery, starvation, or violence. Initially, it is related through the reminiscences of Dorrigo Evans, a 77-year-old surgeon raised in Tasmania whose life has been filtered through two catastrophic events: the illicit love affair he embarked on with Amy Mulvaney, his uncle's wife, as a young recruit in the Australian corps and his WWII capture by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. From bestselling Australian writer Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish) comes a supple meditation on memory, trauma, and empathy that is also a sublime war novel.

The narrow road to the deep north by richard flanagan