The Narrow Road to the Deep North

June 23, 2014
From bestselling Australian writer Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish) comes a supple meditation on memory, trauma, and empathy that is also a sublime war novel. Initially, it is related through the reminiscences of Dorrigo Evans, a 77-year-old surgeon raised in Tasmania whose life has been filtered through two catastrophic events: the illicit love affair he embarked on with Amy Mulvaney, his uncle’s wife, as a young recruit in the Australian corps and his WWII capture by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. Most of the novel recounts Dorrigo’s experience as a POW in the Burmese jungle on the “speedo,” horrific work sessions on the “Death Railway” that leave most of his friends dead from dysentery, starvation, or violence. While Amy, with the rest of the world, believes him dead, Dorrigo’s only respite comes from the friends he tries to keep healthy and sane, fellow sufferers such as Darky Gardiner, Lizard Brancussi, and Rooster MacNiece. Yet it is Dorrigo’s Japanese adversary, Major Nakamura, Flanagan’s most conflicted and fully realized character, whose view of the war—and struggles with the Emperor’s will and his own postwar fate—comes to overshadow Dorrigo’s story, especially in the novel’s bracing second half. Pellucid, epic, and sincerely touching in its treatment of death, this is a powerful novel. 50,000-copy first printing.

July 15, 2014
A literary war novel with asplit personality, about a protagonist who loathes his dual character.Ambition leads to excess in thesixth novel by Flanagan (Wanting, 2009, etc.), a prizewinning writer much renowned in his nativeAustralia. The scenes of Australian POWs held by the Japanese have power anddepth, as do the postwar transformations of soldiers on both sides. But thenovel's deep flaw is a pivotal plot development that aims at the literaryheights of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary but sounds too oftenlike a swoon-worthy bodice ripper. "His pounding head, the pain in everymovement and act and thought, seemed to have as its cause and remedy her, andonly her and only her and only her," rhapsodizes Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon whowill be hailed as a national hero for his leadership in World War II, though hefeels deeply unworthy. His obsession is Amy, a woman he met seemingly bychance, who has made the rest of his existence-including his fiancee-seem draband lifeless. She returns his ardor and ups the ante: "God, she thought, howshe wanted him, and how unseemly and unspeakable were the ways in which shewanted him." Alas, it is not to be, for she is married to his uncle, and he hasa war that will take him away, and each will think the other is dead. And thosestretches are where the novel really comes alive, as they depict the brutalityinflicted by the Japanese on the POWs who must build the Thai-Burma railway(which gives the novel its title) and ultimately illuminate their differentvalues and their shared humanity.When the leads are offstage, the novel approaches greatness in its inquiry into what it means to be a good person. But there's too much "her body was a poem beyondmemorising" for the novel to fulfill its considerable ambition.

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July 1, 2014
Acclaimed Australian author Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish, 2002) here gives us surgeon Dorrigo Evans, from his Tasmanian childhood to old age, along the way having been a POW (as Flanagan's father was) on the gruesomely brutal building of the Siam-Burma railroad and having later achieved a fame he feels is undeserved. Flanagan handles the horrifyingly grim details of the wartime conditions with lapidary precision and is equally good on the romance of the youthful indiscretion that haunts Evans. This accomplished tale of love and war could have broad appeal, but the protracted particulars of the prisoners' treatment may put off quite a few readers. Evans performs at one point a major medical procedure under such primitive and inhuman conditions that it will make even tough-minded readers cringe in disgust. Though much of this fine novel (whose title is taken from the Japanese poet Basho) is extraordinarily beautiful, intelligent, and sharply insightful (and even balancedthe Japanese captors are portrayed, not sympathetically, but with dimension), it is very strong and powerful medicine indeed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2014

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Australian author Flanagan has anticipated writing this novel much of his life, working on it for 12 years and completing it on the day his father died. His father had been a survivor of a Japanese POW camp and the brutal building of the Thai-Burma death railway, famously depicted in The Bridge on the River Kwai, as is the protagonist here. In the POW camp, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans struggles to protect his men, even as he recalls an illicit affair from the past. A letter from home changes everything, and the story is brought up to the present day. Reviews from Australia and the UK have been, not surprisingly, ecstatic.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2014

One of Australia's most celebrated authors, Flanagan has garnered multiple awards for his fiction (Wanting), nonfiction (And What Do You Do, Mr. Gable?), and directing (The Sound of One Hand Clapping). He has an uncanny ability to write literary prose with journalistic exactness set against cinematic landscapes. Taking its name from a collection of haiku poems by Matsuo Basho-, this novel is set at the end of World War II in a Japanese POW camp. Australian prisoners, led by physician Dorrigo Evans, are assigned the grueling task of building the Thai-Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway and famously depicted in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. (Flanagan's father had been a POW and worked on the railway.) Amid daily violence, disease, and death, both the prisoners and the guards search for a sense of normalcy as they remain duty-bound to hierarchy. As the war ends and soldiers return to civilian life, each struggles to find meaning outside the routines of imprisonment. Dorrigo, in particular, has trouble reconciling his status as hero with the unshakable trauma he's experienced. VERDICT Utilizing prose and poems, Flanagan articulates the silent experiences and fractured memories of war. Not so much for fans of historical fiction, this narrative will instead appeal to the deeply introspective reader. [See Prepub Alert, 2/3/14.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

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