Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH by Richard Flanagan

 

"He writes with passion, sensitivity and somehow retains his composure even in face of the worst details of the story he is telling."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

The Bushido code ‘Warrior’s path’ has governed Japan's warrior classes from the 8th century. Making no distinction between life and death, its principles still feature highly in Japanese culture

This compelling novel’s true and grim story stretched my comprehension but humans have the capacity for so much and we are only ever a step away, circumstantially and emotionally, from being something we daren’t consider, let alone truly know. We must face the problem of being unable to understand, to embrace that unknowable, aware that there’s probably no conclusive answer; no final full stop only ever a hanging comma on which we sit, as on a swing in a hidden garden. Flanagan himself says: ‘Horror is just horror.’

The title comes from a collection of Basho’s writings marking the high point of Japanese culture whereas this novel relates events at its lowest point: building a railway (never used) through the Burmese jungle, cleared largely with blunt tools by prisoners of war who were sickly, ill-fed, maltreated, beaten for disobedience – despite simply being too ill or weak to comply - by guards aware that if they failed to obey orders to beat disobedient prisoners they themselves would be thrashed. Such is the impasse of horror at the heart of this novel. It deals with terrible circumstances: the inhumanity of war and, in this war’s theatre, an irreconcilable clash of cultures. To Japanese bred on the warrior cult, the very notion of prisoner-of-war was incomprehensible: why would anyone surrender rather than die and save face? A man who had given in made himself less than a man so that whatever happened to him, didn’t matter. Impossible demands were made because the Emperor required them and refusal was unthinkable

The courage and nerve required to go to the core of what must seem to many of us an ugly absurdity are remarkable, and Flanagan has overcome his obvious dismay at the chronicling of this wretched episode in what is already a wretched circumstance – war, that grievous misuse of human action which makes victims of both the warrior and his foe. He writes with passion, sensitivity and somehow retains his composure even in face of the worst details of the story he is telling and it is, I feel, a story that needs to be told. It’s no good our saying that we do not need to know something merely because it happened, I say that awareness of both aspects of human nature, the evil and the magnanimous, impinge most powerfully on our own willingness to acknowledge our own incomprehension and to accept, if painfully, that we do not understand. I don’t and this wonderful novel encourages us to walk our own narrow road to that depth of incomprehension.

If we don’t hold to bushido as we revile war, armed conflict, the lingering impulse to belligerence, then it’s important to see that there have been elements of it in the culture that we inherited – the Roman general falling on his sword to avoid the ignominy of humiliation after defeat; the abject men who lost their nerve on the killing fields and mud of the Western Front: shot at dawn as an example to others and buried in honour’s graveyard…

Flanagan writes beautifully and with compassion which is the real test of his own fearlessness in telling a fearful story: his description of the young, miserable, ill-nourished ill-clad Japanese soldiers tramping along the wearisome jungle miles past the lines of hapless prisoners who may even have envied them their energy, diminished as it was: at least they could stand up and carry equipment yet were treated cruelly by vicious compadres ‘just obeying orders’.

‘To live was to struggle through terror and pain but, he told himself, one had to live’ is, if amazingly, what somehow rescued those beaten, diseased and broken men. And the ingenuity of some of the men with them, particularly the doctor Dorrigo Evans, in many ways the story’s protagonist, also strains belief: conducting operations with hardly any medical equipment, by sheer determination to get the necessary job done to save a man. It doesn’t always end happily and his own life – before, during then afterwards, his passionate love, his bravery, told in time jumps of the narrative which work well, here – underpins a novel which conveys the sense of something unquenchable in the human spirit, despite the inhumanity it encounters and, as one character says: ’Lest we forget, we say. Isn’t that what we say?’ Crowning the story, the wondrous redemption through self-knowledge and moral strength of a surviving prisoner, Bigelow, ‘haunted only by the way he was haunted by so little of it’.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is published by Chatto & Windus.

Graeme's Memory's Ransom is published by The Conrad Press.