the narrow road to the deep north review

At the age of ninety-four he was finally a free man.” The Japanese protagonists evolve similarly. What did was an irrevocable idea of human goodness, as undeniable as it was beautiful. “In his old age he could honestly say he could recall no acts of violence…he could remember none of his time as a POW at all… of that experience nothing remained. To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life.” The bugler among his troops, Jimmy Bigelow, drifts to a different space.

Years after the war, “ admired reality, as a doctor, he preached it and tried to practice it. Any writer and the discerning reader will admire the discipline and clarity of his control of time and context.Īll characters present at the Japanese prison camp are dazed and disoriented for the rest of their lives by a disconnection from all they had thought important. So, logically, I should just stop here, but I’m not yet mistress of the short form.įlanagan’s story covers a time span between the main character, Dorrigo Evans’s childhood to the moment around 80 years later when one of the Japanese characters dies, yet the reader is consistently oriented as to place and time. The point of the book is that life is, and there is simply nothing more to say. Here are some examples from Flanagan’s book:

After reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan, I learned, among other things, that haiku is not about fitting 17 syllables into three lines, 5-7-5, but about fitting even more meaning into even fewer syllables.

The narrow road to the deep north review