The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Another book that I approached with some trepidation, acquainted as so many of us are, at a distance, of the cruelty of the Japanese against their prisoners during WWII. Australians feel the influence of the Japanese far more closely from territorial proximity and infusion of culture.

Flanagan, whose own father was captured by the Japanese takes on a huge task: to seek to explain, to understand and to place sympathy where sympathy is due. He brings to light, for example, the fact that Japanese soldiers behaved as they did because they knew that if they didn’t do so, through a… show more.

Because my father was a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Burma in World War II, I expected this book to depress me, and I dreaded reading it. But as one of my characters suffered the same fate, I thought I should at least give it a try. And what a pleasant surprise I got.

Yes, it is grim. Yes, it told me things I’d rather not know about what went on in the jungle prison camps. But it also has a sparkling narrative, and it’s romantic, erotic, moving, and exciting. In short, a great surprise and a wonderful,… show more.

I was reluctant to read this novel because it’s partly set in a POW camp during WW2, where Far East Prisoners of War slave on what is often called the Burma Death Railway. My dad was one of these prisoners and, even though I’ve written about it before, the more I know of what he went through, the more disturbed I feel.

This isn’t just a book, it’s a magic trick—and I’m not sure how Flanagan pulls it off. Writing about the prisoners of war forced by Japanese soldiers to build the Thai-Burma Railway during World War II, he pulls no punches in his depictions of human cruelty, and readers will feel every single one. As he renders misery and starvation in relentless focus, the subject matter is pitch black… and yet, by bridging the story to the present, when the survivors and their captors are trying to live normal lives beneath the weight of their history and their actions, Flanagan turns… show more.

Australian doctor and soldier Dorrigo Evans has to find a way to survive the last months of World War II in a Japanese POW camp, where he labors, with other dying men, building an impossible railway to Burma. Normally it wouldn’t be worth exploring such intense and prolonged suffering—but the suffering in this novel feels true and terrifying and somehow sacred. It gets balanced out with the light that graces other parts of Dorrigo’s life, and the overall result is a profound reading experience.