the narrow road to the deep north flanagan

and though his whole body was aflame while playing this terrible bugle call, this music of death, still he played on, hearing it all anew. Yet when he brought the bugle to his lips to play that tune he now knew far too well, he was able to lose himself in the strangeness of the melody. One scene from the middle of the novel resonates through the rest of the pages: a jungle funeral, with one of the prisoners, a malnourished and sickly bugler named Jimmy Bigelow, playing 'Last Post,' the British military equivalent to 'Taps.' When Bigelow steps forward, bugle in hand, he finds that '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. In the final section of the book, Flanagan takes up this question of postwar life - and death - with ironic peacetime portraits of the Japanese and Korean officers, now designated as war criminals they face their own fates with a stoicism Evans and a few other survivors also share. There are occasional flashbacks to the doctor's pre-war affairs, and sometimes flash-forwards in the midst of war to the few survivors and their sometimes-happy endings. In the face of the murderous realities of the forced labor under the Japanese slave-masters, time becomes a fluid thing, suggesting that Evans and other prisoners suffer from a version of PTSD years before that term was coined. His life and his intense subterranean liaisons resound with the mostly silent - but sometimes vocal - recitations of his favorite poems. Flanagan has written a sort of Australian War and Peace, centered on the extraordinary Dorrigo Evans (also Tasmanian-born), a heroic yet philandering doctor.Įvans seems to live as though there were two worlds: 'This world,' Flanagan writes, 'and a hidden world that it took the momentary shafts of late afternoon light to reveal as the real world - of flying particles wildly spinning, shimmering, randomly bouncing into each other and heading off into entirely new directions.' As the novel unfolds, Flanagan does a wonderful job of revealing to us life at the seam between both worlds.Įvans has made his devoted wife suffer terribly because of his affairs, but that doesn't stop him from falling into an intense and tormented adulterous relationship with Amy, the young wife of his uncle, a woman whose eyes burn 'like the blue in a gas flame.' Evans' is a deep and complicated soul. Tasmanian-born novelist Richard Flanagan named his latest book after a spiritually intense travel journal by the 17th century Japanese poet Basho, but this extraordinary new novel presents us with a story much more tumultuous than the great haiku writer's account of his wanderings. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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The narrow road to the deep north flanagan