He carries out medical procedures without anaesthetic or surgical implements in one horrifying episode he attempts an amputation with a kitchen saw. Throughout, Dorrigo Evans is relatively privileged as senior officer. It is appallingly graphic, and very hard to read, page after page.Īustralian and British POWs at work on the Burma Railway. Towards the end some are crawling or dying. The prisoners have to walk seven miles each way through the jungle before they start work, often day and night. They have few tools for the job and wear nothing but filthy “cock rags” and suffer from cholera and any number of parasites. It is the emperor’s will that this railway be built, and it is the fault of the wretched slaves that the railway can never be built. As the whole project becomes less and less viable, so the slaves are beaten for hours on end. The Aussies are forced to work no matter how close to starvation they are and no matter how sick they are. The cast of Australian good blokes – Rooster MacNiece, Darky Gardiner, Squizzy Taylor, Gyppo Nolan, Jackie Mororski and others – also suggests an everyman theme. Richard Flanagan’s father was a prisoner in Burma and his son is on record saying that his book is a tribute to him. Dorrigo Evans, as a colonel and a surgeon, is the acknowledged leader of the Australian prisoners after the fall of Singapore. The central event of the novel is an extended atrocity on the Burma death railway as it is being constructed by hundreds of thousands of slaves, including 13,000 Australians. There was a weariness to the dim light.” There is a lot of this kind of thing. Even describing this clapped-out hotel, Flanagan is reluctant to take his foot off the pedal the air is on some mission of its own: “Dying air dozed in the King of Cornwall’s corridors. He is married to Ella, but when his regiment is shipped out he is deep in adultery with Amy, the lovely wife of a hotel keeper. Starting with his old age, five stages in the life and loves of the main character, Dorrigo Evans, are interwoven. What does this mean? Is it to do with creation? Is it to do with an Australian upbringing? Is “like entering the sea and returning to the beach” an Aussie idea of epiphany, taking place on a beach and bearing some deep significance?
The opening line, “Why at the beginning of things is there always light?”, is one of the latter. There are moments of great beauty but also moments of great bathos. It is perhaps too ambitious, although ambition is not a sin in my book. L ast year’s Booker prize-winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is extraordinarily ambitious.
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