Imagine five members of the British military in a World War II Japanese prison camp. On a single night each suffers a share of nine hundred blows from an ax handle, blackening their skin, breaking bones, detaching ribs. The next day, they are left all day in an unshaded yard in the heat of a jungle sun.
In The Railway Man, one of those POWs, Eric Lomax, unseals his pain with words cracking across the pages like ax handles snapping. The brutal words stop you cold, the writing spare yet vivid. You are told forthrightly how it was. And it was beyond awful.
These captured men were made to work on the Burma to Siam railway. Among their imprisoned number, they assembled a radio receiver and from a variety of sources, drew a map of the train route to help them make sense of what news their radio brought them. They were discovered, charged with sabotage and subversion along with a list of additional offenses grouped under the overall charge of "being a bad influence." For such things the men were strapped to a bench with a hose run down their throats pouring water into them until their stomachs swelled. They were stuffed into cells far too small for them, men in crates. Lomax is only able to eat with an eighteen inch spoon attached to the splint of one of his broken arms. Fear is a relentless, maddening companion. Lomax writes: "It is a strange feeling, being sentenced to death in your early twenties."
But death would hold back and life would be difficult, taking Lomax past his ninety-third birthday, years filled with pain, nightmares, withdrawal and hatred of the Japanese. During his war time captivity he spent many days under interrogation and, despite the beatings and degradation, the person he came to hate more than anyone else was the Japanese interpreter who put the questions to him in English. In the ending sections of the book, in a collision of circumstances nearly beyond belief, Lomax and the interpreter meet again four decades later and Lomax forgives him. One has to marvel. But one also wonders, regardless of what he says, if such forgiveness can ever be complete.
This a book without theater. It is, instead, a steely reporting of what happened fifty years after it did. It tells a story of brutal captors in a position to maim, degrade and kill the imprisoned, the unarmed and the starved. It is little wonder that it took half a century to free the author's mind so that he could tell these things. Even so, at least in the beginning, there is also beauty in the book. The first two chapters on the power and magnificence of steam locomotives are, alone, worth the book's purchase price.
The Railway Man was published in 1995. I had never heard of it until reading Eric Lomax's obiturary. He died October 8, 2012. Nine days later I had already purchased and finished reading his book. Lomax at one point says the deprivations of captivity made him temporarily forget how to read. Thankfully, he never forgot how to write. And in this book, he did it brilliantly.
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Top reviews from other countries
Kedarnath Awati
An amazing true story of reconciliation between former adversaries
Reviewed in India on May 4, 2018L. McKellar
000 died in terrible circumstances building this jungle railway
Reviewed in Canada on October 28, 2014
David I. Howells
A brave and forgiving man....
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2014