The Narrow Road to the Deep North

        I have now finished Flanagan’s book ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North,’ and clearly it is a major achievement and certainly worthy of winning the Man Booker Prize. Anyone who admires good writing should read it.

       It does tend to get referred to as the book about the Japanese prison camp, which certainly features centrally and provides the setting for much of the best writing, but one Booker judge characterised the novel as ‘a love story.’ For me, I have to say that I was not that impressed by the early chapters of the love story theme, where the feelings of the protagonist seemed to me to be obsessively over the top—but I suppose that was the intention. I see it more as a biography of the principal character—Dorrigo (why that name?) Evans, and I wonder how much of his life as described in the novel (apart from the prison camp) reflected the life of Flanagan’s father, who was a prisoner of the Japanese and died in his late nineties after the book was published.

       There are some terrific bits of writing that stick in my mind—the thought processes of the Japanese colonel who gets emotional and professional pleasure out of the skill with which he beheads people with his sword: the beating of Darky Gardiner, which is principally seen through the eyes of prisoners who are compelled to watch, and thus the reader is also—like the prisoners—somewhat detached from the cruelty of what is actually happening: and the description of a forest fire near Hobart, which the author had surely experienced and simply had to write a tour de force chapter about, although its relevance in the book may be questionable.

       The emotional developments of the various Japanese who ran the camp—and who should have been prosecuted as war criminals--are also very skillfully crafted; with time, they each believe that what they did was justified--after all, it was for the Emperor; and anyone who let himself be taken prisoner—rather than killing himself—was beneath contempt and deserved what he got…And anyway, they knew they were god men.

       It is a fairly long read at 350 odd pages, and I sometimes got impatient with the speed of its development, as I sometimes do with novels of this length, but you have to persevere: the effort is well-worth it.