Last Friday afternoon, I finished reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian author Richard Flanagan. This novel won the Man Booker Prize last month, and as a fan of such Booker Prize winners as Life of Pi, Midnight’s Children, and The God of Small Things, I wanted to eat this book for lunch. Moreover, its story takes place in large part during World War II and is told from the perspective of an Australian POW. Given my current writing project, I have been gobbling up as many WWII reads as possible.
As I set the book down, having run out of words left to read, my chest ached. Flanagan has a beautiful way with words. I often told my husband that reading the book made me dizzy. It demanded that I reach so far into my right brain to grasp meaning between otherwise mundane words that it quite literally threw off my equilibrium. And I guess that’s why the book was able to reach so far into my core and move to me to sobbing, ragged tears in parts where nothing more is happening than a restaurant storefront being smashed or a bottle of wine split with an old man, a stranger. Beauty can take strange and unusual forms at times.
Don’t get me wrong though, the book is awful too. Afterall, it seeks to describe the hardships of the POWs who were tasked to build the railway through Thailand (Siam, then) to Burma, by hand no less, and rightfully dubbed the Death Railway. As a consequence, the book contains disturbing, graphic imagery, some of which I fought through while trying to eat lunch. I think I lost weight last week. Some of what these characters (and by extension, the POWs they were modeled after) endured is beyond description, and yet, as an honest author should, Flanagan describes them. But physical suffering isn’t the point of this novel, in direct contrast to Unbroken, which I found to be far too focused on violence than it needed to be. Instead, Flanagan manages to transcend the grime and make you fall utterly in love with a small, unlikely character named Darky. And through Darky, Flanagan touches the face of God.
Books that move me so thoroughly are rare and treasured gems. While I would not recommend such a read for just anyone because there is only so much upsetting material a person can take, I full-heartedly agree with the Man Booker Prize panel in naming this book worthy of the highest honors. For Australia, it will certainly go down as one of the greatest ever written.
I’m already reading it for a second time, but more slowly this time, to taste every word.
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