Richard Flanagan, _The Narrow Road to the Deep North_

ALSO A PICK by our book club, like the Setterfield novel, but as though to underline the folly of generalizing about book club selections, this one was astonishingly good. 

The only other Flanagan novel I had read before this one was, coincidentally, also largely set in a penal colony in the tropics. Gould's Book of Fish vividly presents a 19th century British penal camp in Tasmania, and The Narrow Road to the North even more vividly presents an even grimmer place: one of the Japanese prisoner of war camps whose inmates were charged with constructing the Burma Railroad.

A lot of men my age will remember this setting from the Pierre Boulle novel and David Lean film Bridge on the River Kwai, both of which struck me as shockingly realistic and de-romanticized when I was twelve, but are a Disneyland ride compared to The Narrow Road to the Deep North. If you are looking for a shockingly realistic and de-romanticized WW II novel, Flanagan is your man.

Beyond that, though, the novel is burningly memorable. The main character, Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans, is all-but-engaged when he goes off to war, but the great passion of his life is a woman who happens to be married to his uncle. When he comes back, he does what seems the obvious thing and marries his might-as-well-be fiancée. And so two great silences are imposed upon him. While he is celebrated as a hero and an accomplished surgeon over the remaining course of a long life, he can never really speak of what the camp was like--it is just too grisly and terrible, shows everyone in too ugly a light, is just unspeakable. Nor can he ever acknowledge his most intense, transformative experience of love. The great defining experiences of his life simply may not be uttered. What does that do to a person? That also is what this novel is about.

And then there is the wholly unexpected turn that the novel, unsparing in its depiction of the brutality of the prison camp, also honors the beauty and depth of Japanese culture--the title, for instance, is also that of Basho's great poetic travel journal, and allusions to other great moments of Japanese culture are scattered throughout. The commander of the camp, a decent enough man made monstrous by circumstances, like Dorrigo survives the war and like Dorrigo has to live the remainder of his life with a shadow self he can neither acknowledge nor purge.

All that, and the prose is both supple and steely, its sentences landscapes of feeling and perception. 

Damn. What a good novel.