This powerful, sensitive and evocative novel on the human condition, in extremis, which was recommended by a fellow Amazon reviewer (not to mention Man Booker), helped me reconnect with Australian literature after an absence of several decades. I had read a substantial amount of Aussie literature, back when down under beckoned as a viable alternative. Yet my knowledge was stuck in the days when “everyone” was reading Patrick White’s Voss (Penguin Classics). White would go on to rightly win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. I’ve been to Australia three times, twice on the American government’s “dime.” And so I was amused when Flanagan had his protagonist, Dorrigo Evans attempting to escape from me (and my kind) since “Sydney was full of American GIs from Vietnam on R&R” (p. 364). Tut, tut. I really was not that unruly; my intentions were easily traced, searching for a mindset that, as Flanagan said much earlier in his novel, wouldn’t object to shocking the patrons of the hotel restaurant, which he said far less banally, and much more suggestively: “And wouldn’t that put some cream in their coffee.”
War. Richard Flanagan was never in a war, nor was he apparently ever in the military. But his father was. His father was a prisoner of war who worked on the infamous “death railway” between Thailand (Siam) and Burma. And that experience is the core of this novel. He listened to his father well. And what is depicted is war, in extremis. Virtually no American (or Aussie!) had these experiences in Vietnam. And virtually no Allied troops had these experiences fighting Germany during the Second World War. It was a “perfect storm” of “honor,” “racism,” and the massive collision of the tectonic plates of empires. Flanagan brings all of that out so well. Japan, once so quiet, introspective, simply wanting to be left alone, was dragged onto “the world’s stage” in the 19th century, and assumed it role with a vengeance. The “white man” had no place in Asia. Japan would assume the role of providing “guidance” to the natives there. The last third of the novel is “epilogue,” what happened to the survivors of the Death Railroad after the war was over. Vengeance was dressed up in the robes of judicial proceedings. Nakamura, one of the leaders of the camps who managed to escape that vengeance/justice notes the irony: “they only prosecuted us for what we did to them, never what we did to the Chinese.”
This is a novel in “high definition.” There are numerous crisp, searing images that will remain with me for the rest of my life. The structure of the novel, with the foreshadowing of events, and the interconnectivities that resulted from a country/continent which had a population that was less than some of today’s megalopolis, was brilliantly done. The title itself is taken from Matsuo Basho’s work of the same name, a link between the experiences of these two very different countries. And Flanagan’s prose is rich, meaningful, and almost perfectly wrought. Dominant is the theme of personal honor – often a good thing – run amok, to use a word now in English, which was derived from the language of Java, where Dorrigo Evans was captured. The Japanese were intent on building a railway because the white man said it could not be done, all for the glory of the emperor, their own version of the ancient pyramids, an analogy Flanagan makes several times. And there is also the disastrous consequences derived from the personal honor of the ever so mundane attempt to retain one’s own bodily functions.
I’ll never be able to look at fish “captured” in an aquarium again, without thinking of this novel. As well as a major betrayal of ethics in the medical field: “Because he thought my white lab coat would help him.” And an issue that seems to unite the survivors of all wars: what to tell the families of the ones who didn’t make it, particularly if they died in futile or foolish circumstances: “What did you say? The right thing. Lies.” Flanagan uses the eternal truths of great literature, so it is no surprise that the homecoming of Ulysses is featured as part of a wedding toast. And medical failures haunt: the repeated grasping for a femoral artery that wasn’t there.
It is also a novel about the missed opportunities in love. The book’s cover hints at that also, about a woman who had the “…audacity in wearing a big red flower in her hair…” in the bookstore. She became a haunting obsession. So… if you are going to Sydney… wear a crimson camellia in your hair, though a magnolia blossom might do, along with the pearls, and don’t “walk on by” on that iconic bridge, but stand hand-in-hand, and savor the time that is left. 6-stars.
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