THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH
Author: Richard Flanagan
Publisher: Random House, Rs599
This book sloughs off any nicety and pries open the complexity, brutality, unforgiving sameness and hypocrisy of the human condition. Yet the road widens to possibilities of hope, writes Rinku Ghosh
Somewhere in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan’s conflicted and self-talking protagonist Dorrigo Evans sums up his views on literary worth. A good book is one you would want to re-read but a great work is one which makes you re-read your soul. Perhaps, it was prophesied so. Just as it was destined that Flanagan’s father, the POW survivor of the Japanese-run Burma Railway and inspiration for the book, died the day he penned his last line. Perhaps, this story had to be told and though it would be easy to dismiss it as destined for greatness, it is truly one which shakes you out of your comfort zone and stays on your consciousness for days to come.
For all its epic scale of backdrop, characters, situation and emotion, the Booker winner does what a session at the shrink cannot do: take an incisively and viscerally honest look at our self-propagating lives, peeling them layer by layer, stripping the mask of our role-playing and exposing our pathetic vulnerability, failings, shortcomings and fear and seeking redemption in Ulyssean dreams, be it of escapism or the meaningful pursuit of perfection. It is akin, if one may call it that, to a Conradian journey to the heart of darkness. The real action is not in the historical retelling of life in Japanese-controlled POW camps during World War II or in the generous detailing of the canvas, from the unhappening Tasmania to the devastated streets of a nuked Japan. The real action is in the minds of all the characters inhabiting them. Sample expressions like “virtue is a vanity” or self-analysis like “Evans understood himself as a weak man who was entitled to nothing, a weak man whom the thousand were forming into the shape of their expectations of him as a strong man. It defied sense. They were captives of the Japanese and he was the prisoner of their hope.” And disgusted by his own small frailties, the protagonist takes on challenges as a way of excelling himself, for himself more than others, becoming the leading officer of the Australian POWs but always ill at ease as the dispenser of their fate and workload. Sometimes he echoes the dumbing down of modern life: “…it baffled him how people now touched each other excessively and talked about their problems as though naming life in some way described its mystery or denied its chaos. He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly evaluated and, as much as possible eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more moving than the reading of poetry.”
Flanagan has been successful in taking a deeply insightful look into individuals in the context of what shaped their lives as well as demonstrating a fair understanding of and sympathising with the Japanese tormentors. You cannot quite blame the author for his indulgence of excesses of the White man’s slavery as is the wont of many other writers on the subject. Flanagan, who has been deeply influenced by Japanese thought and literary traditions, doesn’t sympathise just because he is expected to. He rationalises the behaviour of his Japanese tormentors, who are as much impersonal victims of their Emperor’s imperial designs as the Australians, expected to deliver a railway line in 15 months through tropical undergrowth or face the death penalty, pressured to show how Oriental spirit had triumphed over Western skepticism, and who were as much muddied, sludged and diseased as their captives. If they slapped a POW into submission, it is seen not so much a violation of humane justice but a disciplinary gesture they had been trained to endure and practise themselves as novices nurturing a monolithic national ambition. With no men or resources but a just a motley group of prisoners, by shifting iron from fringe lines in Thailand to the Burma Railway, everybody became a part of a large death cult, pushing their extremities and condemning each other. Brotherhood or mateship was not about being a band of brothers but about getting by the bleakness of survival as a human chain.
When challenges become the norm, we realise that returning to normalcy is a bigger challenge. “It seemed far easier to allow his life to be arranged by a much broader general will than his own individual, irrational and no doubt, misplaced terrors. His mind, in any case, he felt was a prison camp of horrors.”
love in the time of death and cholera indeed is the beacon of hope and the only truth, even if unrealised. Dorrigo and his love Amy could have realised the happiness of earthly togetherness by challenging morality itself. But such is the purity of their being “the two of us” that they isolate and distil it from known relationships, even engage themselves with the certitude of convention and choose other mundane partners. They do not sully their love by circumscribing it to worldly custom or their small lives but by setting it free. It is present by being absent. Dorrigan’s “perennial infidelity was in a way fidelity to Amy’s memory” just as for Amy, “love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.” This almost borders on what we would call sufiyana, made more poignant by the separation of the lovers who are lied to by their insecure spouses but who never lose the faith even while staying apart.
The haiku pattern of the book, the juxtaposition of divergent graphic images (the desolation and utter despair of war followed immediately by the prospect and yearning for love), the sudden cutaways, the non-linear structure of episodes make this book a crafted music piece than an easy read. There is a constant rise and fall, a glide and a thud, the rhythm of a movement, as if we are mapping many lifelines, even the most insignificant ones, and investing drama in the seemingly unremarkable but “neverendingness” of human life. The repetition of words, phrases and images is more than an artistic licence. Flanagan, who took 12 years writing and then structuring the book, follows impeccable technique, acceleration with alternate images, the climax of experiences, the plateau and stasis of realisation or compromise as the case maybe and then the placidity of denouement with death being the ultimate liberator of human bondage. Yet by positioning the book’s most evocative moment, Evans’ dealing with the loss of love and realising that as the one true thing in his life, Flanagan holds out the hope that despite the haze of self-deprecation and the comfort of self-denial, one can transcend oneself.