The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

One can judge a book on a number of different levels (plot and characterization to name just two), but writing I find is often the most contentious of all of them.  Some believe that for a book to be considered well written it must be full of complex literary devices, or it should utilise language that is alien to all but the most verbose and lexically gifted readers.  Others think that a book is well-written if it meets its audience at a level that it is pitched while still challenging them, and I have far more sympathy with that view. But sometimes writing can have a true beauty – a transportative aesthetic that transmits more than just images, but smells, tastes, sounds and tactile senses that totally envelop you.  An impenetrable book cannot achieve this, but neither can something populist – it needs to be something special.  Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North is very very special indeed.

The book is set in the Burma death railway during the Second World War, where an unflinching Australian army doctor battles with his Japanese captors to try and allievate the suffering of his rapidly decaying soldiers. It has its core in this horror but it flits between this and flashes backwards and forwards, focussing on the man he was before and after his traumatic ordeal, showing the effect that it had. 

Before the conflict he was a man from the sticks in rural Tasmania who became a doctor and marries a society girl, but fell in lustful love with his uncle’s young wife.  After the war, he is an adulterous and neglectful husband and a cold and distant father, haunted by his war and his love.  The book is marketed as a love story, but I found this the least compelling part of the book.  The descriptions of his marriage are powerful, but they don’t stand out from the rest of the literary field.

Where this book excels and envelops is in Burma on the railway.  It is a pitiless tale of human suffering, with a quality of writing that truly beggars belief.  Flanagan has an ability in a sentence to paint a the most vivid of portraits, but one that engages all the senses.  The mud, the stench, the rot and the screams are all there.  It is totally horrifying and engrossing, and makes you truly wonder the depths of human cruelty and wonder just what could drive someone to do such a thing.

And then he answers, by writing sections from the perspective of his Japanese captors.  This is another of this book’s triumphs, because it shows the prison in which these men were held by their country and their emperor.  Their martial conditioning causes their sociopathic personalities and in the passages of their post-war lives, we compare their lot with that of the few surviving Australians and find that at a basic human level, they were not all that different.

Perhaps great writing is a bit like love. Ineffable, but you know it when you see it.  Buy this book and you’ll see it all right.