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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Aug 2014, 352 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2015, 352 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Alta Ifland
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Moving deftly from a Japanese POW camp to contemporary Australia, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of love, death, and family, exploring the many forms of good and evil, war and truth, guilt and transcendence.
August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
Moving deftly from the POW camp to contemporary Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo and his comrades to those of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of love, death, and family, exploring the many forms of good and evil, war and truth, guilt and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
Chapter 1
Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over.
Bless you, his mother says as she holds him and lets him go. Bless you, boy.
That must have been 1915 or 1916. He would have been one or two. Shadows came later in the form of a forearm rising up, its black outline leaping in the greasy light of a kerosene lantern. Jackie Maguire was sitting in the Evanses' small dark kitchen, crying. No one cried then, except babies. Jackie Maguire was an old man, maybe forty, perhaps older, and he was trying to brush the tears away from his pockmarked face with the back of his hand. Or was it with his fingers?
Only his crying was fixed in Dorrigo ...
Booker Prize
2014
Structure aside, the story itself may be overwhelming for certain readers among whom I count myself: a look at the horrendous hardship experienced by WWII prisoners of war during the construction of the so-called "Death Railway" (or "the Line") between Thailand and Burma. Flanagan refuses to idealize heroism, exploring, instead, the idea that society defines normal people forced by circumstances to act in a certain way as "heroes." He deliberately creates a flawed protagonist in The Narrow Road...continued
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(Reviewed by Alta Ifland).
Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North is based on a terrible chapter from WWII: the construction, under Japanese supervision, of a railway between Thailand and Burma by Allied prisoners of war and local workers. The slave labor conditions and the tortures experienced by the forced laborers claimed the lives of 13,000 Allied prisoners and 90,000 Asians.
The prisoners were forced to march through the jungle along the railway (the "Line"), which followed the course of the river Kwai whenever possible, and labor camps were set up at various points. At the so-called Hellfire Pass, the railway had to cut through the mountains, and the laborers were forced to do the work with minimal construction equipment. As a consequence...
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