The reader is right there with Jimmy Bigelow, Darky Gardiner, Rooster MacNeice, Jack Rainbow, Squizzy Taylor and others as they fight dysentery, starvation, cruel beatings, and terrible conditions. The writing in these sections is vivid, and powerful, never diminishing the humanity or even humour of the characters or the almost domestic detail of the horror that they experienced. The reader experiences this suffering first hand, in the intense and grizzly experiences of the prisoners as they are worked, cruelly and inhumanely, to death in many instances. As with all of Flanagan’s work, the book is not an easy read, asking the reader to suspend a sense of natural progression as the narrative moves between present and past in random motion that also confuses these things as we slide in and out of Dorrigo’s memories.ĭorrigo is a veteran of world war II – a former prisoner-of-war, and his experiences form a sub-plot to the novel, taking us in and out of the minds of his co-prisoners as they work the “line” – the hellish Thai-Burma “death railway”, and suffer intense privations. In the present tense of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, protagonist Dorrigo Evans is a celebrated surgeon, lauded for his work, his bravery, and perhaps for his larrikinism, as he continues to have intense affairs, even in his eighties.
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