the narrow road to the deep north flanagan

“Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.” Asked to write the introduction to a collection of once-contraband sketches by one of the servicemen imprisoned with him in Siam, he begins to recall the experiences of that hellacious period.įlanagan has always bent time to his art in the most captivating ways. “The more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it,” Flanagan writes. He loved a woman once, but tragedy intervened, and since then each new award and commendation only makes Dorrigo feel undeserving and fraudulent. Dorrigo Evans, a celebrated war hero whose life has been an unsatisfying string of sterile affairs and public honors. The story casts its roving eye on 77-year-old Dr. Not just an enlivened historical documentary or a corrective to Pierre Boulle’s “The Bridge over the River Kwai,” this is a classic work of war fiction from a world-class writer.

His quiet, unrelenting style is often unbearably powerful.

Here, Flanagan is writing about events that outstrip surrealism. Its magic is darker and more subtle, its impact more devastating. “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” sports none of that dazzling showmanship. But the horrors of that story about a 19th-century convict kept in a partially submerged cage in Tasmania were leavened by ribald humor and a style so lush that the sentences seemed to send tendrils off the pages, which were printed in several different colors. “Other novels came and went as I continued to fail to write this one.” Those “other novels” that he refers to so modestly include his 2001 masterpiece, “Gould’s Book of Fish,” which also dealt with the unfathomable abuse of prisoners. “I had known for a long time that this was the book I had to write if I was to keep on writing,” Flanagan said recently. Flanagan’s late father was a survivor of that atrocity, which took the lives of more than 12,000 Allied prisoners. Once the Japanese captured Burma, though, its army needed a more efficient resupply route, and so the impossible became possible in just over a year by using some 300,000 people as disposable labor. The British had long investigated this route, but they deemed the jungle impenetrable. Nothing since Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has shaken me like this - all the more so because it’s based on recorded history, rather than apocalyptic speculation.Ī finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, “The Narrow Road to the Deeper North” portrays a singular episode of manic brutality: imperial Japan’s construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in the early 1940s. Beware Richard Flanagan’s new novel, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” His story about a group of Australian POWs during World War II will cast a shadow over your summer and draw you away from friends and family into dark contemplation the way only the most extraordinary books can.

The narrow road to the deep north flanagan