The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014)

I had a hard time reading this book, not because it was poorly written- it's gloriously written - but because it depicts so graphically the horrors of the attempt by the Japanese in World War II to build a railroad through the jungle in Thailand, using slave labor. The slaves are Australian POWs, and they are driven mercilessly, starved and beaten, and many, many died. They develop a deep attachment to each other, with the goal to keep each other alive.

The primary witness to this is an Army doctor, Dorigo Evans, who struggles make moral decisions in the face of intractable orders. His story is told in flashbacks to his childhood on Tasmania, his formal rise in Australian society, his marriage and his deeply passionate affair with his uncle's wife. At every turn, he struggles with the idea of morality - what is a good man? While he is ultimately a hero both during the war and afterward, he feels a failure at the end.

The novel follows the survivors of the Thailand atrocities, Australian, Japanese and Korean, after the war. Some strive to forget. Some cannot forget. Some forgive themselves, some do not. Memory, the inevitable forgetting, is a constant theme.

It is a powerful book, horrific in that it portrays a real event and real actions, committed by people on people. Terrifying. ( )

My uncle died in Thailand working on the infamous railway. This novel is a very moving, often horrifying, tribute to the many who died there. It's also a beautiful love story, complex and believable. ( )

The horrific details of survival for both Australian POWs and their Japanese (and one Korean) enslavers in the dank depths of the Thai-Burmese jungled border to construct a Japanese railway during WWII are difficult to read and yet compelling. Their attempts to return to something approaching normalcy in the post-war period are equally discomforting and yet compelling. I found myself drawn to the Japanese characters, not because of any sympathy for them, but because their stories are so rarely told (the rare exceptions being Japanese works available in translation, like Ooka Shohei's 'Fires on the Plain' (Philippines) and Ishikawa Tatsuzo's 'Soldiers Alive' (China). The two love stories of the main character, Dorrigo Evans, somewhat paralleled by the post-war love story of Nakamura, a Japanese officer, are a stark contrast to the jungle. The love relationships seem remote and sterile compared to the endless rain, mud, feces, starvation, emaciation, ulcers, tiredness, and death in the jungle. While the novel is well-written on the whole, some parts seem overwritten, overwrought; nonetheless it's a compelling novel. ( )

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A brilliant novel about love, life, and the crushing, terrible horror of war. ( )