Review- The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan has been working on this novel for over 12 years, writing other novels in between. He’d gone through countless drafts, reworked the story, started completely over. The reason it troubled him so much was because central to the story are the Australian POWs who worked on the Thai-Burma death railway. An experience shared by his father. He didn’t just want to get the story right, he had to get the story right. And I believe, deep down in my guts, in my heart and with every fibre of my being that he has got the story right.
Richard Flanagan has written a tragic love story, a deconstruction of heroism and mateship, and captured a side of humanity I’ve never read before. Wars, according to our history books, have beginnings and ends but for those who take part in wars, who are swept up in it’s maelstrom, there is no beginning or end. There is only life. And the damage war causes must be endured by those lucky or unlucky enough to survive it.
Dorrigo Evans is a Weary Dunlop type character. Revered by his fellow soldiers/prisoners and mythologized by his country’s media, politicians and people. But Dorrigo’s experience of War and being a POW doesn’t equate to the image his men needed during their imprisonment nor the one thrust upon him later. He battled his role in the POW camp and tried to hide from the one at home. At the expense of family, friends and love. It is not that these images are based on lies, they just don’t ring true to himself. And after surviving the horror of internment he can no longer make sense of the emotions of the life he must now grapple with.
Flanagan structures this novel uniquely. I think he was trying to base his story on a Japanese style but am not 100% sure. We start with Dorrigo’s early years growing up in rural Tasmania and his journey to becoming a surgeon but in between we start to get snippets of his time in the POW camp. We jump to Dorrigo’s later years before jumping back to his time just before the war and an affair that will change Dorrigo irrevocably. When we get to his time at the POW camp the story is contracted around one day, one 24 hour period, but it doesn’t feel like just one day, it feels like many lifetimes. We barely follow Dorrigo through this day as we have already glimpsed bits and pieces and will re-live yet more. Instead we get everyone else’s story. The other prisoners, the guards, the Japanese officers in charge. Flanagan clearly shows us each characters’ motivations, desires, inner turmoil and demons. As the day unfolds we experience the terror, the devastation, the depredation, the hope, the loyalty, the betrayal, the choices of life on the Thai-Burma death railway.
But Flanagan’s novel is not just about what happened on the death railway but also what happened after. How it was explained and justified. How it was hidden and run away from. How justice can be escaped but is also used as revenge. And how it never really ended for anyone involved.
We often talk about the Anzac spirit in Australia but we rarely confront it. War is never altruistic, no matter which side you are on. Survival brings out the best and worst in people as does victory, as does love. Flanagan explores this warts and all. Dorrigo is not a hero, nor is he a bad man, father, husband. He is all of theses things and he is neither. This is a masterwork by one of Australia’s best writers.
Buy the book here…
By Karen Greenberg
The most amazing fact about the more than 700 previously unseen classified Guantánamo documents released by WikiLeaks and several unaffiliated news organizations the night of Sunday, April 24, is how little in them is new. The information in these documents — admittedly not classified “top secret” but merely “secret” — spells out details that buttress what we already knew, which is this: From day one at Guantánamo, the U.S. national security apparatus has known very little about the detainees in custody. The United States does not know who they are, how to assess what they say, and what threat they ultimately pose.
Given this vacuum of ignorance, U.S. officials decided at the outset that it was better to be safe than sorry. Therefore, any imaginable way in which behavior or statements could be deemed dangerous led to individual detainees being classified as “high risk.” The result was the policy we have seen since 2002 — a policy of assessing potential danger based on details like what kind of watches the detainees wore, the way they drew on the dirt floors of their cages, and whether they had travel documents on them. In addition, the just-released documents reaffirm the fact that much of the material on the detainees apparently came from hearsay derived from what seems to have been a limited number of interrogations, some performed under circumstances amounting to torture.
It is not just the conclusions of Guantánamo critics like myself that are being verified by these newly found documents. The conclusions of the judges who have sifted through available information to determine just who deserves to be at Guantánamo and who is being held on the basis of insufficient evidence have also been reinforced. In 58 habeas cases spanning both George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, federal judges have determined that in 36 of the cases there is insufficient evidence to hold these individuals and that often the detention was based on information obtained through hearsay, frequently the result of torture. In other words, the little evidence that existed was largely unreliable.
The sad fact is that these documents tell us more about ourselves than about the detainees. They tell us that U.S. officials to this day know very little based on hard evidence about the majority of those who have been held at Guantánamo, that assessments of risk have all too often been based on flights of imagination that tend to enhance the sense of power and capability of al Qaeda, and that the criteria for determining risk are at best murky. Those deemed to pose a risk ranged from individual detainees who proclaimed angry threats against their guards to those who were believed to have been actively involved in terrorism.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once pointed out, in reference to the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although the quip may seem facile, it is actually a candid assessment of what has gone wrong at Guantánamo from the time it opened in January 2002. It continues to go wrong to this day. The proper, lawful, most security-minded restatement of Rumsfeld’s maxim would be this: Absence of evidence requires better intelligence, more careful judgments, and more savvy realism. Without facts, it is not only the just treatment of detainees that is at issue — it is the security of the United States itself.
Karen Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law and author of
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