A book about an Australian prisoner of war forced by the Japanese to build a railway in Burma. Man Booker Prize winner 2014. The book is mostly worth the read, but still, I had a kind of rocky start with it.
Flannagan tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian Army surgeon during the second world war. Before the war, Dorrigo, an ambituous medic of modest background, becomes engaged with Ella, a woman from an upper-class family in Melbourne. However, he also begins a passionate affair with Amy, his uncle's young wife .
Having joined the Australian war effort, Dorrigo and his men get captured at Singapore, from where they are brought to the Burmese Jungle. There, the prisoners of war come under the supervision of the Japanese Major Nakamura. Nakamura, addicted to methamphetamines, is desperately trying to fulfill his emperor's will to build a railway, while facing an increasingly decimated workforce of Australian prisoners. Even though he is treated preferentially by the Japanese as the highest ranking officer, Evans is still beloved by his men, trying to save as many of them as possible. Nevertheless, most of Dorrigo's subordinates die, be it of cholera, other diseases or of mistreatment by their captors.
The final part of the book is mostly devoted to the time after the war. Dorrigo returns to Australia. With him and Amy both thinking of each other as dead, Dorrigo gets married to Ella. Over the next decades, he leads a life of social and professional success and increasing recognition for his military service. At the same time, Evans becomes notoriously unfaithful towards his wife and memories of his time in the jungle continue to haunt him. Him and Amy are only to see each other once more by chance, but do not aim to arrange for a follow up encounter. Amy dies of cancer and Dorrigo in a traffic accident.
The story of Dorrigo's life after the war is interspersed with the story of Major Nakamura. After the war, Nakamura struggles to survive in post war Japan, where he is wanted as a war criminal by the Americans. He, however, manages to assume a new identity, marries, and manages to re-establish himself professionally and socially. Nakamura, who is also never able to shed the memories of teh war, finally dies of cancer.
The book is very hard to get into, as it is very philosophical, almost a a bit pretentious in the beginning. As pointed out by a reviewer in the Guardian, Flannagan jumps from "past to present, from moment to moment, country to country, from woman's bed to woman's bed." The description of the life of the Australian prisoners and the Japanese atrocities which dominates the middle part of the novel is hard to swallow. At the same time, Flannagan does a good job at conveying the perspective of both the Japanese captors and the Australian prisoners. The final part which focuses on the various protagonists' lives after the war is both fascinating and touching. It also profits from Flannagan resorting to a more conventional narrative style.
Favorite quotes:
"A happy man has no past, while an unhappy one has nothing else."
"I love being with people, Ella said. The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel."
"If they had spirit, Nakamura said, they would have chosen death rather than the shame of being a prisoner."
"Before, I worried how my men looked at me when I stood in front of them. But after, I just looked at them. That was enough." (A Japanese colonel talking about his first time beheading a prisoner).
"He felt he might fly apart into a million fragments were it not for her arms and body holding him." (Dorrigo about Amy)
"He lies and cheats and robs too, but for them, always for them. For he has come to love them, and every day he understands that he is failing in his love, for every day more and more of them die."
"He refused to stop trying to help them live. He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying."
(Dorrigo about his men in Burma)
"They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself. It was hard to explain how good that fried fish and chips and cheap red wine felt inside them." (A reunion of the veterans after the war)
"....the army no longer the wild jaunt it had been with its defeats and victories and the living- the living!- constantly tearing anything established into ribbons, melting solid into air." (Dorrigo about post war career choices."
"His mind, in any case, he felt was a prison camp of horrors. He did not wish to give it any more weight than necessary."
"Jack and me. We didn't really know each other. i'm not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was the room and he was the note and now he is gone. And everything is silent." (A widow about her husband who died in Japanese captivity)
"And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality in which everything that did not matter- professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space- was vested with greatest significance, while everything that did matter- pleasure, joy, friendship, love- was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally." (Dorrigo about his life after the war)
"As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy's absence shaped everything- even when- and sometimes most particularly when- Dorrigo wasn't thinking of her."
"In eighteen months- six more than she had been given- she would be burried in a suburban cemetery, an unremarkable lot amidst acres of similarly unremarkable graves. No one would ever see her again, and after a time even her nieces' memories would fade and then, like them also, finally be no more." (The last thing we are told about Amy)
"....the army no longer the wild jaunt it had been with its defeats and victories and the living- the living!- constantly tearing anything established into ribbons, melting solid into air." (Dorrigo about post war career choices."
"His mind, in any case, he felt was a prison camp of horrors. He did not wish to give it any more weight than necessary."
"Jack and me. We didn't really know each other. i'm not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was the room and he was the note and now he is gone. And everything is silent." (A widow about her husband who died in Japanese captivity)
"And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality in which everything that did not matter- professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space- was vested with greatest significance, while everything that did matter- pleasure, joy, friendship, love- was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally." (Dorrigo about his life after the war)
"As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy's absence shaped everything- even when- and sometimes most particularly when- Dorrigo wasn't thinking of her."
"In eighteen months- six more than she had been given- she would be burried in a suburban cemetery, an unremarkable lot amidst acres of similarly unremarkable graves. No one would ever see her again, and after a time even her nieces' memories would fade and then, like them also, finally be no more." (The last thing we are told about Amy)
