Flanagan knew about the railroad, too, because his father, Archie, was in the prison camps.* “Narrow Road” also begins with a prisoner number, but this time it is in the dedication: to his father, who died as Flanagan was finishing the book.
He is clearly interested in describing events that are often called indescribable, and perhaps that’s part of why he chose to tackle the death railroad. Flanagan himself has said that “it’s a strange story that isn’t readily absorbed into any nation’s dreams,” quite unlike, say, the landing at Gallipoli by Australian soldiers in the First World War, which has become the country’s defining narrative of itself.
He lifted his gaze to see a pale, wasted child.Īlthough there were nine thousand Australian P.O.W.s who worked on the railroad, a third of whom died while imprisoned, the episode never took hold of the national imagination. The bone, too, was starting to rot and break off into flakes. Sloughing tendons and fasciae were exposed, the muscles were tunneled and separated by gaping sinuses, between which he could glimpse a raw tibial bone that looked as if a dog had gnawed it.
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Flanagan’s attention to the minute horrors of the prison camps is relentless, as when he describes an Australian surgeon, with no equipment or resources, attending to a dying comrade:Ī severe, untreated ulcer left a thin strip of intact skin down the outer side of the calf, the rest of the leg being a huge ulcer from which poured offensive, greyish pus. The workers, made up of Asian civilians and Allied prisoners of war, were denied medical attention, starved, and assaulted by the guards. The central subject is the Thai-Burma railway, built between Bangkok and Rangoon by a quarter of a million forced laborers during the Second World War, to support the Japanese in their Burma campaign. Referring to Tasmania by its original European name, Gould writes in his diary, while imprisoned in isolation, that “in the entire unknown, umapped western half of Van Diemen’s land, only savages roamed & no white settlement was to be found, save for this one gaol for the recalcitrant.” Along with the appalling treatment of the convicts themselves, the invasion and subsequent genocide of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population by British colonists is never far from the surface.Ī love story set amid horrific historic events is also a way to describe “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” It took Flanagan twelve years to write, and there has been a definite shift in style: here, the brutality comes to the forefront of the narrative, and the strange, almost mythical qualities of “Gould” are replaced by a jarring realism. What emerges, through the murky depths, is the love story of Gould’s affair with Twopenny Sal, an indigenous woman who is held as the mistress of the Commandant. The sections each begin with one of the fish Gould studied, and they start to resemble, or perhaps become, human characters in his life, the most memorable of whom is the sadistic, syphilitic Commandant, whose “folly was to think you could turn a penal colony into a nation.” That survey is Flanagan’s organizing principle. He is William Buelow Gould, a convict-artist who was transported to the prison island in the early nineteenth century and forced by the colony’s surgeon to paint local fish as part of a scientific survey. “Gould,” which is really a book about how history is told and transmitted, is set predominantly in Tasmania’s colonial era and centers on a prisoner referred to by his jailers only as a number. That sense of unreality pervades “Gould’s Book of Fish” (2001), Flanagan’s third novel and first masterpiece it’s a work of magical realism, reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez with its shape-shifting, anthropomorphic characters and time-travelling narrative.
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In a piece for this magazine in 2013, Flanagan described Tasmania, where he still lives, as an “island Wunderkammer, crammed full of the exotic and the strange, the beautiful and the cruel, conducive not to notions of progress but to a sense of unreality.” More than mere biographical detail, this remote island and its troubled, often violent history is one of his obsessions. Richard Flanagan, who yesterday became the third Australian to win the Booker Prize, for his novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” was born in Tasmania.
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