Book Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Ally reviews The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. This has recently been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014.

Sometimes, I read so many books that the narratives start to wash over me, I feel no connection with any character, and I forget the message (if I found it in the first place) as soon as I close the last page. And I hate that. I start to miss that physical ache somewhere in my chest that you get when you love a book so much that it makes you want to cry when it's over, just because it's over. So I read more and more trying to find that connection again, of course making the problem worse. But as does happen working in this wonderful bookstore, I found it eventually in Richard Flanagan's “Narrow Road to the Deep North”.

Every page was like a raw, anguished song, pulling me deeper and deeper into the novel. I hesitate to say that it is about the POWs during World War Two, because it is about so much more than that. It is about human suffering, but also about love, so many forms of love, and about redemption. It is about heartache, about giving and taking. About human nature. About culture, cruelty, the past and the future. It made me hopeful that humans never really lose their humanity, and made me despair that love could come and go in a split second sparkle of an eye.

It hit a particular note with me because my grandfather was a prisoner of war in Java, and I had never truly, in an emotional sense, understood what he had gone through.Though, as one of the Japanese commanders says “Java is heaven, Burma is hell, but no one comes back from Guinea”, the harsh realities for the survivors was similar: the guilt, the anger, the difficulty to connect with anyone who hadn't experienced being broken over and over, treated like less than an animal, seeing their friends and family die around them from disease and sometimes just loss of will to take another breath in the hell they were living. This book both gave me insight into what my grandfather had gone through, and simultaneously told me that I never would understand it, as much empathy as I have.

Yes, reading this book is almost physically painful, and the pictures Flanagan paints will make you cringe, and shut your eyes, and almost wish you hadn't read what you just did. Yes, you will start to question life as you know it, including questioning the character and intentions of those you love most and think you know best in the world. Yes, you will feel unsure of your own thoughts, of who put them there, if they are even yours at all. But, yes you will grow as a person just sitting in your armchair for a couple of hours, and yes, there is that perfect feeling of catharsis, and no, this book will never let you go.