After its army captured
Burma from the British during World War II, Japan identified a need for an
overland route in order to safely supply its troops. For this purpose, the
army’s High Command decided that a railroad line through Burma was necessary.
It was to be built with limited plans, primitive tools, slave labor, impossible
orders and unfailing devotion to the emperor. Many of the laborers were
Australian prisoners-of-war who had surrendered at the fall of Singapore. In Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard
Flanagan tells the story of some of these Australians. Dorrigo Evans was a
doctor who tried his best to protect his men from the worst cruelties of the
Japanese deprivations. But the men who were forced to work on this railroad,
surviving on starvation rations, without proper tools, without adequate
clothing, shelter, rest and medicine, could not be protected. They died by the
thousands. Every man was missed but one unnecessary death seemed to affect this
tightly-knit group more than any other—that of Sergeant Darky Gardiner, a man
of inner strength, a steady demeanor and common sense. After the war,
Gardiner’s death haunted the survivors, both war hero Evans and the
rank-and-file enlisted men as they struggled to put the horrors of the war
behind them. In this Man Booker Prize winning book, Flanagan writes moving
depictions of men suffering from hunger, exhaustion and disease. He creates
characters the reader comes to deeply care about. Perhaps this is because the
book is dedicated to Prisoner san byaku
san ju go (335), his own father.
