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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Richard Flanagan
Adult

Until recently, I'd never cursed an author, definitely not for making me care. It's what I want as a reader.

And then I read Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The deeper I got into the story, the more often I found myself making silent bargains with Flanagan to just lighten up, please. I'd still like his book.

But he didn't lighten up. He made me care and feel in ways I only ever have for my own characters.

And that's when the cursing began. I even shook my fist at one point. And yes, I cried. I'm not a book cryer. Movies, weddings, a particularly good episode of "Modern Family" and I'm shamelessly weeping, but not books. Not even The Fault in Our Stars. I think it's an occupational callous I've built up over the years. Or, I thought it was. Until Flanagan. 

Basic plot: Dorrigo Evans is an Australian doctor who is taken prisoner during WW II by the Japanese and sent as a POW to help build the Death Railway through Siam and Burma. It's a story he recalls in his old age, unable to find love and remembering the one, forbidden love he gave up before leaving for war, his uncle's wife, Amy. In his own words, Evans says, "A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else”.

Remorse is a powerful emotion. But if a whole story were solely about remorse and wallowing, I'd just as soon get up, make a cheese sandwich and abandon the story. Life is too short. While Flanagan's tale is full of remorse and regret, opportunities missed or not taken, it's also about those moments in life when a human being gets the chance to be more than they are, and - scared, unsure, but unwavering - takes it. It's the inseprarable interweaving of these and the connections they build that makes The Narrow Road into Deep North such an unforgettable read.

That and the amazing writing. Would that I could romance, cajole, sometimes even bully or beat words the way Flanagan does into sentences and thoughts with such pervasive effect.

For other great reads, saunter over to Barrie Summy's website. Mudslides or blizzards, she delivers!

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Few topics are more contentious at Powell's than agreeing on the "best" works of fiction. Our tastes run the gamut from experimental tragicomedies to multi-generational sagas to offbeat coming-of-age tales to surreal character studies... and so on. As such, rather than present selections from one perspective, we thought it wise to get a more representative [...]

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Belzhar
Meg Wolitzer
YA

In the spirit of the cold winter months' clamor for a good book to curl up with, I present Belzhar. I had the great pleasure of listening to Meg Wolitzer speak at BEA in May. She is an author of predominantly adult books who's tried her hand at YA and delivered a strong, new voice to enjoy.

Belzhar is the story of Jam who has basically given up on living after she loses her boyfriend. She stops functioning at school and becomes so depressed her parents and therapist send her to The Wooden Barn, a school for teens struggling with traumatic issues in Vermont. There, Jam is enrolled in a special English class that changes her life. Not only does she meet a new boy but also, at the same time, gets to communicate with the boy she's lost in a world unlike any other. Jam makes friends, rebuilds her life, but cannot move forward until she not only faces but relives the trauma that imploded her old life.

Woltizer's writing is strong, her characters both flawed and endearing, and her alternate reality within reality a great hook that entices the reader throughout the story.

There is an interesting trend, almost rule, within YA that the story is written in present tense. This is to make the reader feel closer to the events happening, and to mimic how very much teenagers are affected and live in the "now". It has made me wonder how exportable present tense storytelling is. I've used it in a picture book, just to try it out, to get a feel for the effect of tense. In a way, present tense makes even the past seem very present. It speeds up action and imbues what is happening with novelty, urgency and unpreditability. There's no telling how the story can end, especially if it is in first person POV. I just ran across a chapter of present tense in an adult novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Man Booker Winner 2014). The story up until that moment had been told in simple past, then suddenly, present tense appears. It was a jarring, blast of air that pulled me out of the observer's position and into the narrative.  I straightened and listened more closely. This had to be important. What a difference a tense can make.

For more great books to balance out the hustle and bustle of the end of the year,  check out Barrie Summy's site. Happy reading and a wonderful new year!

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I haven’t read a book as intense and unrelenting as Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North in a really long time. I began the book on Wednesday and finished it last night so I could return it to the library. I wouldn’t recommend such a concentrated reading especially while one is eating pumpkin pie and drinking hot coffee while the characters in the book are starving to death. It felt a bit wrong. The book, however, is most excellent.

I managed to get in the library hold queue early, before the Booker Prize because of Sue’s marvelous review at Whispering Gums.

The main focus of the book is Dorrigo Evans. Born into a working class family he manages through smarts and hard work to become a surgeon. But his life takes a turn when World War II breaks out. He becomes an army doctor and has the misfortune of being captured with hundreds of other men by the Japanese. He ends up being the ranking officer among the Australian POWs he is sent with to work on The Line. The Emperor has decided these POWs will be put to work as slaves to build the Thai-Burma Railway, something western engineers declared could not be done. The book moves fluidly back and forth between pre-war, war, and post-war times. And it doesn’t always stay focused on Dorrigo Evans. We get to know some of the other POWs as well as a couple of the Japanese officers who are working the men to death. And each character, no matter how short his part in the story, is fully created. We know his motivations, we know his tricks to keep alive.

The only characters in the book I found a bit flat were the women. Because this isn’t just a war story, it’s a love story too. Dorrigo falls in love with Ella, a pretty girl from a well off family. She has connections that will help him go far. But when he meets Amy in a bookshop he realizes what he feels for Ella isn’t really love at all. This bold girl in the bookshop with the red camellia in her hair rocks Dorrigo’s world and then she’s gone, a chance meeting and nothing more. Only Dorrigo soon finds out that Amy is married to his uncle. Dorrigo and Amy have an affair.

When Dorrigo returns from the war it is Ella he marries but he spends the rest of his life thinking of Amy and how Ella is not her. He also becomes a womanizer. We end up knowing more about Amy but not much at all about Ella. Why does she stay with Dorrigo? How can she put up with his affairs and with his unspoken accusations that she is not Amy? She is a bit like Penelope to Dorrigo’s Odysseus. Which is appropriate given how Dorrigo loves poetry and his guiding poem is Tennyson’s Ulysses.

Poetry is an important element in the book. Dorrigo is always reciting it, it is his method of getting by in the POW camp as well as a means of seducing women. But Dorrigo is not the only poetry lover in the book. Two of the Japanese officers bond over their love of haiku. But whereas poetry for Dorrigo is something that guides him and touches him and sustains him, Colonel Kota and Nakamura had a different experience of poetry:

They recited to each other more of their favorite haiku, and they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and the Japanese spirit — that Japanese spirit that was soon to daily travel along their railway all the way to Burma, the Japanese spirit that from Burma would find its way to India, the Japanese spirit that would from there conquer the world.

At the beginning of each section of the book a haiku appears. And, Flanagan’s title is the same as the title of the great poet Basho’s travel book of prose and poetry.

Flanagan has an unsparing eye for detail whether it be a POW debating with himself about when he should eat his daily ration of one small rice ball to a moving scene when the daily pyre of cholera victims and their possessions was being burned:

As Dorrigo Evans bowed his head and stepped away from the flames, Jimmy Bigelow stepped forward, shook his bugle to dislodge whatever scorpions or centipedes might have taken shelter there, and raised it to his lips. His mouth was a mess, the palate having shed its skin in rags. His lips had swollen up as well, and his tongue — so swollen and so sore that rice tasted like hot grapeshot — sat in his mouth like some terrible plank of wood that would not properly do its work.

And the scene goes on in great detail so we know just how difficult and painful it is for Jimmy to play the bugle but he does it anyway. Every single day for the newly dead.

You’d think that with all that the book would be depressing. But it isn’t. I’m not quite sure why. I definitely felt drained by the end, a little sad, but not depressed. So if you are thinking the subject matter of the book will be too overwhelming for you to bear, don’t worry. It’s full of horrors but Flanagan manages with pacing and scene and time changes to keep the reader from sinking into despair.

An excellent book. A moving book. A book I will not soon forget.

Filed under: Books, Reviews Tagged: Richard Flanagan

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Describe your latest book/project/work. Something Rich and Strange is a collection of selected stories, including three stories previously unpublished in book form. Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start. Donald Harington is as underrated as any America writer I know of, and I'd suggest [...]

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Christmas holidays are all about catching up with friends and family, and catching up on all the books that I haven’t had a chance to read during the year. I’m not a fan of reading on the beach – too sunny, too many kids to watch, too many friends to chat with. But once I […]

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It is commendable that recent Prime Ministers have continued the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards even though, as with some other literary prizes, its future has often seemed under threat. It is a prestigious national award amongst the also-important state and other literary prizes. And it is lucrative, with winners receiving $80 000 and shortlisted authors […]

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Richard Flanagan has won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Richard Flanagan’s affecting and harrowing story of the Burma “Death Railway” and the Australian prisoners of war who were forced to build it has trumped over 150 of the English-speaking world’s best novels to carry off the prize. […]

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Evie’s Wyld’s brooding novel, All the Birds, Singing is hard to let go of. A damp menace clings to the story from the very first line and draws the reader in as the main character Jake Whyte attempts to discover who or what is mutilating her sheep. At the same time we are sucked backwards to the Australian outback, to uncover Jake’s past and understand why she is living on an isolated British island – her only companion: a dog named Dog.

Wyld’s book recently won the Miles Franklin award, beating Tim Winton’s Eyrie, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and others, with its evocative prose. “Spare, but pitch perfect,” was how the judging panel described Wyld’s writing – “visceral and powerfully measured in tone.” But it’s the structure of All the Birds, Singing that also has me intrigued.

Wyld uses alternating chapters to move the story forwards on the windswept farm and backwards through the outback. The tense of the writing also alternates, with Wyld using the present tense for the flashbacks and the past tense for the rest of the story. The book leaves great gaps in the narrative, but compels the reader to find the source of Jake’s damaged emotional and physical state as well as the identity of the sheep killer.

Wyld apparently had intended to keep the narrative simple when she started this story, but found barriers were thrown up by her choice of writing in first person. She had to find a way to solve them. After writing 50,000 words she decided that reversing the chronology of Jake’s past was a better was of telling the story.

“I was quite reluctant to do it,” she says in an interview with the BBC. “It ended up being a maths problem. I had to make endless charts and work out where I was. I did confuse myself a lot, writing it.”

Wyld builds tension with the flashbacks that take us deeper into Jake’s past, and ultimately to the decision that changed everything. We are fed uncensored snapshots of an ugly side of Australia – in outback towns, on a fly-blown sheep property and above a greasy take-away shop, meeting a cast of troubled characters along the way. These scenes are contrasted with the boggy sheep farm where Jake has gone to escape her past. But even here she’s haunted by some kind of beast.

A maths problem has never been so darkly engaging.

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I’ve just returned from visiting some major cities in the USA. It was illuminating to see which Australian literature is stocked in their (mostly) indie bookstores. This is anecdotal but shows which Australian books browsers are seeing, raising the profile of our literature.

Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief was the most prominent Australian book. I didn’t go to one shop where it wasn’t stocked.

The ABIA (Australian Book Industry) 2014 overall award winner, The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion was also popular. And a close third was Shaun Tan’s inimical Rules of Summer, which has recently won a prestigious Boston Globe-Horn Book picture book honour award. Some stores had copies in stacks.

http://www.hbook.com/2014/05/news/boston-globe-horn-book-awards/picture-book-reviews-2014-boston-globe-horn-book-award-winner-honor-books/#_

I noticed a few other Tans shelved in ‘graphic novels’, including his seminal work, The Arrival – which is newly available in paperback.

One large store had an Oceania section, where Eleanor Catton’s Man-Booker winner, The Luminaries rubbed shoulders with an up-to-date selection of Australian novels. These included hot-off-the-press Miles Franklin winner All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld and Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, plus expected big-names – Tim Winton with Eyrie, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and works by Thomas Keneally and David Malouf. Less expected but very welcome was Patrick Holland.I chaired a session with Patrick at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival a few years ago and particularly like his short stories Riding the Trains in Japan.

Australian literary fiction I found in other stores included Kirsten Tranter’s A Common Loss, Patrick White’s The Hanging Garden and some Peter Carey.

One NY children’s/YA specialist was particularly enthusiastic about Australian writers. Her store had hosted Gus Gordon to promote his picture book, Herman and Rosie, a CBCA honour book, which is set in New York City. They also stocked Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca, John Marsden, David McRobbie’s Wayne series (also a TV series), Catherine Jinks’ Genius Squad (How to Catch a Bogle was available elsewhere) and some of Jaclyn Moriarty’s YA. One of my three top YA books for 2013, The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee was available in HB with a stunning cover and Foxlee’s children’s novel Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy was promoted as part of the Summer Holidays Reading Guide.

Elsewhere I spied Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island, published as Sea Hearts here (the Australian edition has the best cover); Lian Tanner’s Keepers trilogy; John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice and Sonya Hartnett’s The Children of the King. These are excellent books that we are proud to claim as Australian.

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