The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a novel of such extraordinary power that it left me disturbed for days after finishing it. The major portion follows a World War II Australian army surgeon through almost unimaginable adversities as a prisoner of war involved in the building of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, and that section is the most impressive, but the story also follows him, some of his fellow captives, and even their Japanese and Korean captors in the years after the war; and includes a romance between the surgeon and his uncle's wife.

In the POW section, after witnessing the murder by beating of one of his fellow captives, the surgeon "thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilizations it created...." This violence and horror is so effectively communicated by Flanagan that it becomes overwhelming and devastating and very real. This is the heart of the book.

The stories of the various men after the war, particularly of the surgeon, read as case studies in PTSD. The returned soldiers "died off quickly, strangely, in car smashes and suicides and creeping diseases....too many of their marriages faltered and staggered....They went bush by themselves....they stayed in town with others and drank too much; they went a bit crazy...." The surgeon's life-after-war finds him highly successful in his profession and honored by his country for his role in the prison camp, yet he is filled with emptiness and guilt. All the accounts are profoundly moving, even those of the captors.

And then, unfortunately, there's the love story, which seems out of place and almost treacly in comparison to the rest of the book. I believe Flanagan meant it to be a contrast to the violence and despair, but it instead weakens the message and seems as if belongs in another novel entirely.

Still, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a grand achievement, the best current novel I have read in some time. (Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize)