Book Review - The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

 The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Sydney: Vintage Books Australia, 2014 (first published 2013)   ISBN 9780857980366

This is a very good book. Ostensibly about the life of Dorrigo Evans, an army doctor who spent the War as a POW on the Burma Railway, it is a book that is much more than that. I have read some Richard Flanagan before, and admired his writing but had some quibbles. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is worthy of the praise and awards it garnered, which included the 2014 Booker Prize.

Growing up Australian in the 1970s, the sufferings of Australian soldiers in both World Wars was innate. Those who were unfortunate enough to find themselves working on the Burma railway were always well represented in the news and events that commemorated the Second World War. With figureheads such as "Weary" Dunlop to keep the flame of memory alive, we all grew up understanding the brutal treatment handed out by the Japanese to the prisoners in their drive to construct their railway. None more so, I imagine, than Richard Flanagan himself, whose father was one of those prisoners, lucky enough to survive and make it back to Australia after the war.

That would surely be motivation to write about what was a cataclysmic event during such a cataclysmic time, but the question that no doubt posed itself to Flanagan was how to write about it in a way that didn't turn into a horror story, or a war story, or a hate story. Flanagan's choice was to write about it as a love story.

The book is structured in sections. In the first section the reader moves between timelines, from Dorrigo's childhood, his war in Syria, and his time training in Adelaide. It is here he meets Amy Mulvaney, the young wife of his uncle, who owns a hotel on the beachfront outside Adelaide. Dorrigo and Amy fall passionately in love, and begin an affair. Apart from the obvious complication that Amy is married to his uncle, Dorrigo also has a girlfriend back in Melbourne. Ella is the sort of person Dorrigo, an up-and-coming doctor, would be expected to marry.

Soon enough he is sent off to war, leaving both Amy and Ella, and moving into the hell of the camps. Flanagan does not flinch from the horrors of what happened in Burma, but he tells the story from multiple viewpoints, including the Japanese guards and officers. The last section of the book is post-war, and describes what happens not only to Dorrigo, but to his camp-mates and to the Japanese guards, one of whom is executed as a war criminal. 

Flanagan uses the story he creates to investigate what it is that makes us human. What is truly good, what is truly evil, what is hate and what is love. Dorrigo is a flawed man, and well aware of his flaws. He questions his selfless acts in the camp - doing the right thing because it's expected rather than from the goodness of his heart. His constant philandering destroys his marriage, in a vain attempt to forget Amy, which he almost achieves.

The Japanese guards and officers, particularly Nakamura, cannot understand why they are hunted and tried by the Allies. They accepted their fate to be stuck in the jungle, and they would have accepted their fate if they were in the shoes of the Australians. That they lost the war and had to pay they could understand, but not the sense of outraged justice that came with the trials.

It is love that Flanagan investigates most closely. There is the passionate love between Amy and Dorrigo, the love of the prisoners one for another even through the harshest of times. Flanagan shows how one can never know how such love occurs and who might show it, but that such an experience creates a bond that can't be severed. There is the kind of love between Dorrigo and Ella, which is mostly acceptance but occasionally is something more.

Dorrigo's life-arc is a tragic one - a love that could never be (Amy tells him to forget her when he leaves to go overseas), a struggle for survival in which he becomes a hero (something he never thinks himself to be), a marriage that he backs into and never really tries to make work, only to understand later in life that Amy (who he thought was dead) was in fact alive. Amy for her part, initially thought Dorrigo died in the War, but when he came back she could never understand why he didn't try and get in touch with her. This tragic state of affairs came about through thwarted love, with Amy's husband lying to her about Dorrigo, and Ella lying to Dorrigo about Amy.

This is a book of almost overwhelming sadness. Happiness is fleeting and doomed, horror is terrifyingly real, and life is mostly an empty searching for something that Flanagan is not sure even exists. The descriptive writing is evocative of location and emotion, and unlike some of his other books there is not so much moralising put into the mouths of the characters, although he can't help himself at times, with Dorrigo happening upon a reading by the Angry Penguins, and one of the POWs ending up at Nagasaki. Tears almost flowed for me as the end came for Dorrigo.

Flanagan writes, apropos of Dorrigo's love of reading that "a good book... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great books compels you to reread your own soul." Using that as a guide, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a good book rather than a great one... but it is very good. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Contemporary Portraits by Murray Bail

Contemporary Portraits by Murray Bail

St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1975  ISBN 0702209783

I've now read quite a bit of Murray Bail, and I have to state I'm still not sure what to make of his writing. Self-consciously avant-garde in some respects, but in others very much a narrative storyteller, his novels have met with varying success, and he has also written a much-praised biography of the artist Ian Fairweather.

This collection of stories, published five years before his first novel, lean much more toward the avant-garde Bail. Some are absurd, some are surreal, not one is a mere "story". There is no real theme in the content of the stories, but there is an over-riding concern throughout the book with language - what it is, how it is constructed, and what meaning it conveys.

Several of the stories convey the sometimes absurd ways that language fails to convey meaning, and how familiar tropes can be turned inside out. When basic premises that we take for granted are turned on their head, all of a sudden one is without moorings and floating free in quite disturbing ways.

Bail is not afraid to do these things, which makes the stories always interesting if not always entertaining or understandable. It's no surprise that his most successful work (Eucalyptus) was much more mainstream in style and structure.

This one is for for Bail aficionados, but still worth reading. Brief descriptions on each story below -

Heubler

Heubler is a photographer who announces that he is determined to photograph everyone in the world, beginning with 23 specific types of people. The narrator claims he knows at least one of every type, listed in short biographies. Bail plays with meaning (the person that hears voices is a switchboard operator, the person who is beautiful and dumb can't speak, and so on). Everything about this story is absurd - Heubler's premise, and the narrator's responses.

Life of the Party

Owner of a house in a middle-class suburb, wife and kids at the beach house - he returns home and sets up a BBQ party, then climbs into a tree house to see what happens. Watches his invited friends get drunk, cook the BBQ and have a good time ("I've never been so drunk in all my life!"). As they leave he wonders if they would have had as much fun if he'd been there.

The Drover's Wife

The author recognises his wife as the subject of Drysdale's painting. She left him for reasons he can't fathom. He writes about her, what she looks like, her habits, and how her likes differed from his "she had a funny way about her". He describes when she killed a snake at a beach house they rented (homage to Lawson). He describes a trip beyond Port Augusta, where she had a cup of tea with a drover while he waited in the car.

Zoellner's Definition

Description of Leon Zoellner via dictionary definitions of physical attributes, compared to his attributes. Final sentence - "Words. Verbal expression; used in language to denote a thing, attribute or relation." Story shows how difficult it is to use words to actually describe those things.

Portrait of Electricity

Going through a museum dedicated to a great man, who is noticeably absent throughout (no pictures, no real sense of what he looked like). Everybody knows about him and his thoughts, but the museum (in his house?) has things like pieces of carpet he stood on etc. Final exhibits are a piece of his excreta and a telephone handset.

The Silence

Joe Tapp camps in the desert trapping rabbits. Every two weeks Norm Treloar comes in his truck to pick up the carcases. The story covers six weeks, and three visits. The first visit Norm turns up with his usual "how'd you be?" - Joe finds that Norm talks too much. The second visit Joe doesn't say anything to Norm, but Norm continues to talk. The third visit Joe hides in the sandhills until Norm leaves, and vows to do that every time the truck comes.

The Dog Show

Story of a long-running dog show where the people and dogs swap positions - the people become more dog-like in their habits and looks as the show goes on - eating dog biscuits while the dogs eat pies.

Paradise

Merv Hector is the bus driver on the route to Paradise. He is happy in life, slow but steady. He crashes the bus. He is next a lift man in an office building. He likes going up rather than down, takes his lunch on the roof. He crashes the lift, and after sleeping during a lunch break is fired. He then gets a job changing weather signs. He feels fine, so changes it to that even though it's raining...."The phone began to ring."

Ore

Wes Williams a stockbroker who falls ill while contemplating the oncoming copper boom, taste of copper in his mouth. Goes to the doctor, who tells him he has a fever. Then a section describing the doctor and some mining types (surveyors etc.) drilling into his skull for ore. He wakes up feeling better.

Cul-de-Sac (uncompleted)

Apart from the first, all paragraphs in this story are numbered, beginning at 78 through to 108. Roy Biv is a draughtsman who at first seems to be drawing a street plan for a cul-de-sac. He has blue hands and orange hair, and his watch strap is held together with rubber bands. The paragraphs seem to be a fever dream of him trying to walk to the cul-de-sac but never quite getting there, getting advice from people he meets, and observing strange things about the city (conveyor belts of rubbish running through it, live people taking shifts as statues). The final paragraph (108) seems to return to "reality" with Roy again drawing the plan.

The Partitions

Strange surreal story about a group of people walking and crawling along the top of partitions in what seems to be an endless office space. All sorts of things happen, they see all sorts of things happening. Nothing makes sense.

A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z.

A story of Kathy Pridham, working at the British Council in Karachi as a Librarian. She falls in with an Indian painter, Syed Masood, and "goes native". Masood is a drunk, and drags her away from her expat friends and lifestyle. He abuses her, and in the end she loses her job and ends up back in London. The story is also about language, about words and the meanings we attach to them.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell