Flanagan's Premier award-winner evokes remembrance
Richard Flanagan’s powerfully moving novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North claimed the Premier’s Prize and fiction category award at last night’s WA Premier’s Book Awards 2014 and encourages readers to remember, writes Alison Wakeham.
An Australian surgeon trying to save prisoners of war from death on the notorious Thai-Burma Railway receives a letter that will define his life.
Dorrigo Evans' experience of World War II and his affair with Amy, an uncle's young wife, are the twin forces of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a richly drawn novel stripped of sentimentality.
Evans is haunted by the relentless beating of Darky Gardiner on the Death Railway, though, in his later years, he struggles to recount the detail of that death as he writes a foreword to a book. But as an ageing Evans laments his fading memory of the war, Flanagan has written one of the most powerful testimonies of its inhumanity, a book that resonates a long time after reading.
It weaves its spell through past and present, through Evans' conflicted life, those of his fellow prisoners of war and the men who enslaved them.
Evans and his men are sent to Changi in Singapore after being captured in Java and then to Thailand to construct a railway from a jungle. The custodian of men weakened by malnutrition and malaria and stinking of ulcers, Evans must barter for their lives every day. The weak volunteer to take the place of the weaker; the dead are set alight to prevent disease.
Their Japanese commander is fuelled by drugs and alcohol and driven by an unbending desire to serve his country. He is not blind to the suffering but knows that it and death are the casualties of the railway's success.
Each man has his own reason for fighting.
For the Australians, it is an existence of small triumphs amid the pouring rain and filth, of grim humour amid the horror as they are worked relentlessly to their deaths.
The survivors, both prisoners and jailers, are marked for ever.
Evans eventually returns to Australia and, as his actions in the war become widely known, he is honoured as a hero, but he believes himself a fraud. During the war, he simply acted in a way he believed his men expected him to act. He is feted by those who do not know him. And his private life is hardly noble.
He had delayed his return from the war, eager to put aside his conventional marriage to Ella and the strictures of society. He lives a life of duty and dull affairs, ambivalent about his skill as a surgeon. But he will come to recognise the power of his bond with his wife, the strength of their shared experiences, and with his family, when he reunites with an older brother.
Of Amy, there are only fragments of memories, the letter — and fate — extinguishing his hope.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a powerfully moving novel about the varying nature of love and the fragility of memories. But, most powerfully, it encourages us to remember.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North won top glory and $40,000 in prizes at last night’s WA Premier’s Book Awards 2014; the title is also on the short list for the Man Booker Prize, to be awarded on October 14; the book is published by Random House under its Vintage imprint and is due out in paperback format on November 3 (trade paperback $33, paperback $20, ebook $12).
