The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Dorrigo Evans is an Australian surgeon and, later, a public figure who never believed in his own reputation. In 1943 he is the senior officer among prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma railway, responsible for choosing each morning which sick and starving men will go out to the Line, arguing over numbers with Japanese officers who have their own orders and their own hunger, and operating with sharpened spoons on ulcers that go to the bone. Before the war there was an affair with his uncle's young wife Amy, three weeks in Adelaide that he has measured everything since against. Flanagan moves between the camp, that love affair, and Dorrigo's long decorated postwar life of infidelity and hollowness, and gives chapters to the Japanese and Korean guards as well, following them into their own diminished later years. His father was a prisoner on the railway, and the camp sequences have a particularity that fiction rarely achieves. The book takes its title from Bashō and threads Japanese poetry through the horror without a hint of consolation, arriving at something unusual for a war novel: not that suffering ennobles, but that it explains nothing and confers nothing.