The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Chatto & Windus, 2014

In the center of the novel is an Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans, who during World War II was captured by the Japanese and among other prisoners of war built the Thai-Burma Railway, also known as the Road of Death.

The novel skips across continents and time layers, but the main events can be divided into three groups: the life of Evans before the war in Melbourne, Japanese camp and the post-war period, when Evans even received a certain notoriety.

Dorrigo was the youngest in a family of seven children. He soon lost touch with his brothers and sisters, every member of the family went on their path. He grew up in Tasmania, but later moved to the mainland, to Melbourne, where the six-foot tall Evans enters the university. Dorrigo shows no special abilities to medicine, but still graduates from the university. Since the beginning of the war he was a surgeon being moved to a military camp in Adelaide, where Evans goes through training. Evans marries, has a lover called Amy on the side and flies to Singapore to fight on the side of the Allies.

Evans in Singapore meets with other soldiers from his unit, and when Singapore surrenders to the Japanese army, the Australians are captured. Evans and his colleagues formes a special unit of prisoners, which includes only the Australians. His unit is sent to the construction work, namely for building of the Thai-Burma railway, which will run from Thailand to Burma.

In his novel Richard Flanagan is trying to lay on paper using artistic methods the story of Australians who were stationed at the Japanese POW camp. Perhaps the main problem of the novel is that it is too artistic. Flanagan has a lush style, he now and then inserts a quote from poetry, tends to bold descriptions and refuses to use quotation marks for dialogue. Such stylistic brightness, sometimes even with a touch of poetry, perfectly matches the life of the main character in the civilian world. Dorrigo Evans loves books and women more than anything else. Women like him, and he fascinates them. Evans is bursting with feelings. Despite his obvious sins (Evans does not even cheat on his wife, he acts as if he does not notice her, at least most of his life he did not notice her), Evans is a likeable hero. He is persistent, passionate, honest man of not too many words, and he is understood without words, by both men and women. He seems not to be blamed for his sins. He's like this by nature. Especially because in the novel his wife Ella is a pale shadow, not full-blooded person, and how we can sympathize with her that her husband is a womanizer?

The protagonist’s soul wanderings is the most intriguing part of the book. Whom he will choose and what happened to Evans after the war, these questions claws at us most of all. Colorful prose of Flanagan comes over already colorful with passion "civilian" part of the plot. But for the life in the camp are Flanagan’s colors are not so suitable. Too unnatural it looks, like a circus, not a camp for prisoners of war. Indeed, Flanagan doesn’t know a sense of proportion. Evans and his friends in the camp act like clowns, tirelessly repeat Britanisms «mate» and «rightio», Nakamura tells long tales about the wisdom of the emperor, as if sitting with friends and colleagues drinking tea, and in general it is not like a camp at all, but Chinese, or rather Japanese, circus. Flanagan goes over the top with paints: if everything is so colorful, it may be that all the prisoners do well in the camp? Maybe they were there on vacation and not with their bones the Road was built? The main hero has a horrible diarrhea, but the author depicts.

«He raised a crumbling canvas flap and Dorrigo Evans followed him through the flared nostril of the tent into a stench, redolent of anchovy paste and shit, so astringent it burnt in their mouths. The slimy red flame of a kerosene lantern seemed to Dorrigo Evans to make the blackness leap and twist in a strange, vaporous dance, as if the cholera bacillus was a creature within whose bowels they lived and moved. At the far end of the shelter, a particularly wretched-looking skeleton sat up and smiled.»

A friend of the protagonist is drowning in a pit of waste and Flanagan again uses colorful prose. Thus, this style fails to convey the monotony, the horror and darkness of life in captivity.
In general, Flanagan’s book entertains more than makes us to think. Among the interesting thoughts there is one that the author touches upon in the chapters written from the point of view of the Japanese officers and guards. One of the guards says that it turned out like that: the Japanese, who had committed crimes against the Allies, white people, were sentenced to death and declared war criminals. But at the same time, the Japanese, who bullied and killed other Asians, weren’t even touched. It turns out that the racial-class division was under any conditions and at all times, whether it was war or peacetime.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North stirs the heart, but only at the beginning and at the end. The middle part on life on POW camp is a failure.

Eyrie

Tim Winton
Eyrie

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014/ Picador UK, 2014

Perth, Australia, our days. Tom Keely lives alone in an apartment building in a poor neighborhood. He's almost 50, he is divorced, childless, he is out of work. Keely was once known environmental activist, he even appeared on TV screens, the newspapers and magazines wrote about him. But after a conflict with officials, he lost his job because he refused to cover the illegal actions of the authorities. Keely issued dirty linen in public, and now no private company wants to hire him, not to mention the state.

Keely lives on some savings and money from the sale of the house. All that he can afford is a small apartment in the seedy neighborhood. Keely worsens his problems with alcohol and regular antidepressants. Most of the novel we will be see Keely either drunk, or on pills, or hang-over.

Keely rarely comes from the apartment, speaks to no one, occasionally swims in the ocean. His mother Doris, a successful lawyer, and sister Faith, working in the financial sector, worries about Keely. He assures them that he's all right.

Everything changes in Keely’s life when he unexpectedly meets a woman, which resembles someone, in the building,. She is Gemma, a girl from the past. Now Gemma is in her forties, and she raises her grandson - a strange boy with no less strange name Kai. Keely is surprised by this meeting, he did not even know that Gemma lived in the same house with him just down the hall.

Despite its length, Eyrie reads in one breath. That’s not surprising considering that Winton has written 25 books already. The secret of success here is that the book equally attracts with its plot intrigue and an ability to write about everyday life.

Winton pushes his characters to an almost impossible situation, making the novel very dark and kind of depressing. Heroes fall into a trap, and all their actions and attempts are doomed. It is important not to lose the human face, not be on the same level with animals, those who prey on the main characters of the novel.

Despair largely even comes not from an external source, i.e. criminal elements, but from life itself. Keely after his fall from the top steps on the lowest rung of society, at his age left with nothing - except the conscience and moral attitudes. He largely looks up to his father, who was a priest and really saved people. Keely is also trying, but realizes that he lacks hardness. And his moral values are his own ruin. Because of them, he does not fit into society, can not keep in touch with other people.

Actually everyday life stifles Keely and Gemma and the like. They are honest, strong-willed people who simply can not cope with the system. Everything is against them. Toward the end of the novel Keely pawns his computer equipment to the shop to get a little cash. Clerk gives Keely a hundred dollars less than usual just because Keely looks, due to stress and alcohol, as if he were a junkie.
Crime story takes a turn in the second half of the book, and in the first Winton depicts Australian life of bottom. The novel is written in the third person, but such that it is similar to the first. And the voice of Keely is simultaneously resentful and angry at society (and himself), but also from bitter at his own impotence and unwillingness to change something. Such bitterness in his voice helps make the novel drive, when seemingly nothing happens, other than sitting in a stuffy room, swimming in the ocean, a short phone talk with the sister. Descriptions of hangover here are gorgeous, extremely realistic and somewhat painful. It is a rare thing.

“He peeled back the lids with a gospel gasp and levered himself upright and bipedal if not immediately ambulatory. Teetered a moment in the bad weather and shapeless mortification of something like waking consciousness. Which was heinous. Though in the scheme of things today’s discomfort was the least of his troubles. He should be glad of the distraction. This little malaise was only fleeting. Well, temporary. Just a bloody hangover. But for all that a pearler anyway, a real swine-choker. Even his feet hurt. And one leg was still intoxicated.”

In the novel there is no quotation marks at the dialogues, they are part of the main text, but the dialogues are actually Winton’s strong point. It’s difficult to write a believable dialogue between child and adult, and Winton makes it believable.

Eyrie’s action takes place in Australia, though the novel is rather a hybrid of literature of the three countries. From Australia there is destroying heat and large spaces, from English literature dialogues and britanisms and from the American prose the story itself.

Winton is a brilliant stylist, a good storyteller, and his novel is a great success.

Crime Factory: Hard Labour

Crime Factory: Hard Labour

Crime Factory Publications, 2012

Australia is far from the other continents, but its geographical location does not detract from the fact that in Australia they write good literature, too. Workers of the Crime Factory’d made the second anthology, this time – all-Australian. Short stories for an anthology are written by writers who live or lived in Australia. Among the authors there are veterans who published dozens of novels, and novice, who published less than a dozen stories.

Among the obvious advantages of the collection is correct placement of stories (thanks to the editors). «Hard Labour» starts with strong stories and also ends with them. All that is in the middle is of varying quality. The first two stories are authored by Garry Disher and Leigh Redhead, known outside their native continent. Disher presented brilliantly plotted «Wyatt's Art», the story about a professional burglar Wyatt. To enjoy the story, it is not necessary to know what happened in the previous novels about Wyatt. «Grassed» by Leigh Redhead is much more emotional and more "Australian". Drugs, free love, communes - it's all there on the green continent, adjusted for local color. «Killing Peacocks» by Angela Savage is a neo-noir story of domestic violence, with a grim finale.

After the kick-start there is a bulk of the stories, which are well-written, but devoid of anything that would make them stand out from the dozens of other similar crime stories.

Among the names, I had little or no knowledge, it is worth noting David Whish-Wilson with his «In Savage Freedom», a grim story of a father who is out of prison and wants to save his son from the criminal world, and Andrew Nette, with «Chasing Atlantis», a story that best reveals the specificity of Australian crime. Doomsday cult, rapists of minors, fields planted with marijuana, a conman, specializing in cult rip-offs - the story deserves the award as "the most Australian."

Rounding out the collection two works of masters, Adrian McKinty («The Dutch Book») and Peter Corris («Prodigal Son»). The action in «The Dutch Book» takes place in Boston, but the main character is Australian. The story is about that life in general is a dangerous game, and gamblers know about it more than anybody else. «Prodigal Son», the story of a private investigator, is interesting in how Corris makes his detective Cliff Hardy not a knight on mean streets, frozen in the 40's, but the modern detective, using modern technology. Although in terms of morality Hardy is old-fashioned chap.

After the heavy shift this anthology is what needs to relax and get to know about the dark side of Australia.