Most prizes, in the end, are about competition. A Man Booker winner, for instance, is often judged by the yardstick set by other novelists on a shortlist. Having been deemed worthier than Howard Jacobson and Ali Smith is arguably accomplishment enough, but Richard Flanagan is not just the better of six writers. The Booker jury this year had arrived at its decision after reading all of 156 titles. Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North , it seemed clear, had held its own from the start. Judges were lavish in their praise — “An absolutely superb novel, a really outstanding work of literature.” For the Tasmanian Flanagan, the £50,000 prize money was more sustenance than reward. Writing Narrow Road had drained his resources so completely, he was considering a change in career. He had started preparing for work in Australian mines.
It doesn’t take long to identify the cause of Flanagan’s exhaustion. His precise prose, the book’s lack of atmospheric clutter and its uninterrupted narrative progress are all achievements that can only be put down to fatiguing labour. But Flanagan’s investment is inevitably emotional. Many of Narrow Road’s characters are prisoners of war. Reduced to slaves by the Japanese Empire, they try almost impossibly to outlast World War II while building a 415km rail line from Thailand to Burma. Flanagan’s father too, says the novel’s dust jacket, had survived the construction of the proverbial Death Railway. He died on the day his son finished writing Narrow Road . With personal stakes this high, it is surprising to find that much of Flanagan’s book is bereft of judgement and sentimentality. The moral structure of the narrative seems defined by a little something Dorrigo Evans’ mother says early on — “The world is. It just is, boy.”
Two essential themes emerge in the novel’s opening pages itself — women and war. Dorrigo Evans finds comfort in the arms of adoring women and is puzzled by the sight of men helplessly crying because of battle. Decades later, we are soon told by Flanagan, Evans will be celebrated as a war hero himself. The famous surgeon is the first to undermine the adulation he comes to receive — “He’d just had more success at living than dying.” In Evans, we find a protagonist who is eternally a sum of his contradictions. His public rectitude is challenged by his numerous adulteries. The empathy he displays as a leader of POWs in a torturous camp altogether eludes him when he returns to a family. He loathes virtue and doesn’t believe there is any merit to be found in suffering. Yet it is only in a land of protracted suffering that he finds greater purpose.
The incongruities that separate Evans’ thoughts and actions help delay a certainty of periodic closure that novels often afford. Like a well-crafted matryoshka doll, the chapters of the book end with a disclosure but also an unravelling. In one of
Major Nakamura, the man who presides over the violence in a “madhouse beyond allusion”, only survives the cruelties he prescribes because of an abstract loyalty and an addiction to methamphetamine. Nakamura quotes haiku right in the middle of a conversation about beheadings. The Death Railway, he tells himself, is Japan’s way of taking the beauty and wisdom of poets like Matsuo Basho to the larger world. In a novel that borrows its title from one of Basho’s more renowned works, poetry is not simply a site of reconciliation. Watching his men burst into flame on a pyre, Evans recites the verse of Kipling. Tennyson follows him to his deathbed. Poetry in Narrow Road doesn’t only provide rationale. It also welcomes dissonance.
The book’s seductive instability, its unhinging flux, is perhaps best typified by the character of Amy Mulvaney. A second wife to Evans’ uncle, Amy’s love affair with a young Evans punctuates the novel and the life of its protagonist almost as completely as the war. While her infidelity seems to trap her in a state of perpetual tumult, she pursues desire and love with an enviable doggedness. Not a character that can be easily pigeonholed, she was, as Evans remembered, “a moving paradox, at once embarrassed and yet excited by the very thing she oozed.” Undoubtedly passionate, the relationship between Amy and Evans is never sickeningly romantic. Their lovemaking is once interrupted by a dog mauling a penguin. Much like this sudden sight of blood, their intimacy is threatened by perennial fears of discovery and conflict.
It is precisely this restrained disquiet that Flanagan forsakes in the last few pages of his book. He ties together disparate threads. Evans, who found no comfort in the role of a hero, lives to save the day. In the author’s defence, though, the world he depicts had been rendered smaller by war. His successes in representing the impact of love and horror far outweigh the tidiness of his serendipitous conclusions. Readers should unreservedly feel relieved that Flanagan has won the Booker. An author with his acumen deserves to hone his talents, not waste them in dusty mines.