FOCUS LITERATURE Sudha Devi Nayak
“The Line was broken, as all lines finally are. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.”
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a novel by Australian writer Richard Flanagan, drew special attention when it won the Man Booker Prize, 2014. The book takes its title from the 17th Century Haiku poet Basho’s travelogue, Oko no Hosomichi through the Northeastern Region, Tokoku, Japan. Basho says, ”Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by.”
Flanagan has perhaps borrowed the title to depict the long and arduous journey undertaken in the novel to depict man’s inhumanity to man — not however without its redemptive graces. The novel lays out in excruciating detail the brutal torture of prisoners in Japan’s POW camp and the struggle of one man, surgeon Dorrigo Evans, to save the people under his command in appalling slavish conditions. It is a mind- searing essay on the agony of daily life where a man does not know whether he would survive enough to see the day after.
Flanagan’s father himself was a Burma Death Railway survivor who died on the day his son completed the novel.
It was the painful task of Dorrigo Evans to send sick and near-dying prisoners to the line, to bargain for their lives with the Japanese military officers and the equally painful task of sending others in their place, all the time knowing there was only death awaiting them. With his good cheer and compassion, Evans kept the prisoners ever dwindling in number in a spirit of camaraderie even as he witnessed their terrible travails.
“Because courage, survival, love – all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all, or they died, every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.”
The horror of building the railway can be summed up in these two words — The Line — the men who were on the line and the rest of humanity who were not. ”A line was something that proceeded from one point to another — from reality to unreality, from life to hell — breadthless length as he recalled Euclid describing it in schoolboy geometry. A length without breadth, a life without meaning, the procession from life to death. A journey to hell.”
Through the horror of war, Evans kept his sanity, his faith in love, faith in the essential goodness of men, and his love of books. A book for him was a talisman and a good book had an aura that protected him through the night. In it was his endless quest, his Ithaca.
Among his various loves, he found Amy while finishing his training at army camp. Amy was the love of his life, who figured in his dreams and with whom he envisioned a life. But, in the midst of the horror of war, ironically, he could not even recall her face. The novel throws up various other characters, each trying to live a life in the midst of disease and starvation and torture. Flanagan’s comment is, “For, the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time and all human history was a history of violence.”
The novel is not only about war but also its aftermath of forgetting and forgiveness. The men who survived the war; and their minds distilled the memory of the POW camp of horror and humiliation into something beautiful, the idea of human goodness.
The Korean guard who glorified brutality reached the gallows struggling, to pay for the crimes committed. There was the Japanese official with a fondness for haiku who sanctioned brutality in the firm belief he was doing it for the Emperor. After the war, escaping trial for war crimes, he lived a normal life stifling his conscience and yet wondering, “What can prepare you for such kindness?” Another official died in his bed, old and decrepit with a copy of Basho’s journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North opening at the lines, “Days and months are travellers of eternity. So too the years that pass by.”
Evans is acclaimed a national hero while he suffered the vertigo of achievement and the futility of it all. He lived a soulless life with wife Ella, passing Amy by on a bridge, unable to speak to her. A forest fire claims his whole family and he lies dying, for three days, passing from being to a nonbeing, dreaming of his days on the line.
“The Line was broken, as all lines finally are. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.”
