The Luminaries

Tough Times, Tough Men

Like Eleanor Catton’s superb The Luminaries, that won the Man Booker Award last year, and revealed a little know chapter in the history of New Zealand (the gold rush), this year’s winner, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road To The Deep North, brings out a shocking episode during World War II—a story of unspeakable cruelty, eclipsed perhaps because the horrors of the Holocaust simply dwarfed everything else.

In 1943, the Japanese Emperor ordered the construction of a railway line-- the 415-km-long Burma-Thailand railway--to be built by 30,000 prisoners of war of many nationalities converted to slave labour. The men were forced to work under inhuman conditions, with little food, no healthcare and hardly any tools. The Japanese armymen who had to meet unrealistic targets without any resources, treated their prisoners worse than animals. To the Japanese way of life, a prisoner of war should have died of shame rather than be dishonoured; on the other hand they wanted to show the whites, that Asians could also manage great feats of engineering.

Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan’s book The Narrow Road To The Deep North (the title comes from a poem by the great master Basho) is a tribute to his father who survived the horrors of the Death Railway, or The Line, as it came be known, while thousands (the number is put at 14,000) died of starvation, illness or torture by the Japanese.

The narrator is Australian military surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, the commanding officer of just one division, trying to keep his men alive under hellish conditions. He was later feted and lionised for his heroism on the war front, but the horrors that he witnessed, do not allow him to feel any pride.

For the reader,  the relentless suffering of the men gets to be stomach-churning (a cheerful soldier, Darky Gardiner, is beaten mercilessly till the attackers can go on no more, and then dies an ignoble death drowning in the communal latrine’s river of filth), but Flanagan concedes that the Japanese commanders were helpless too. For a Japanese, failure is akin to death—the system of hara-kiri (ritual suicide) is part of their culture.

The Japanese commanding officer, Nakamura, ill and drug-dependent himself, tries his best to meet crazy targets with a dying workforce. Later, he cunningly escapes being tried as a war criminal, and realises the real perpetrators were never punished; as it always happens, the juniors took the rap.

Evans is haunted not just by the POW experience, but also his all-consuming affair with his uncle’s young wife Amy, as he goes through his loveless marriage of convenience to the dull Ella, and many infidelities.

Flanagan said about the book in an interview, “"I felt I carried something within me as a consequence of growing up as a child of the death railway. People come back from cosmic trauma but the wound does not end with them. It passes on to others.

"I didn't want to write this book but in the end I couldn't escape it. If I didn't write it, I'm not sure I could write another book. I had to deal with things which could become a stumbling block within me. I had to define them."

It took him 12 years to write the book, in which the reader can only imagine the terrible ordeal the men suffered— the indignity of their grim existence,  as bad as the physical privation.

The novel has already been hailed as a masterpiece and an epic comparable to the best in contemporary fiction. It is not an easy read, the love story is also full of guilt and torment.  Dorrigo Evans is a complex protagonist— heroic but not particularly admirable.  Still, what one takes away from the book, is a story of courage and will to survive.

The Narrow Road To The Deep North

By Richard Flanagan

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Pages: 464