ABSTRACT
Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize–winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Flanagan 2014), tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, surgeon and womanizer, who is interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war (POW) camp during World War II. The POWs are set to work building the Thailand-Burma railway, a project thought to be impossible by the British colonial powers, but completed with brute force and slave labour under Japanese rule in sixteen months during the early 1940s. The novel graphically depicts the harsh conditions, impossible assignments and horrendous destruction that this megalomaniacal project entailed. At the same time, it brings the characters alive in compelling fashion, not just the Australian prisoners but also the Japanese camp commanders and Korean camp guards. As one reviewer has noted:
What stretches the story beyond the visceral pain it brings to life is the attention paid to these men as individuals, their pettiness and their courage, their acts of betrayal and affection, and their efforts to cling to trappings of civilization no matter how slight or futile.
(Charles 2014) As senior officer and medical doctor, Evans fulfils a special role in the camp: he is leader of his battalion and in this capacity has regular dialogue and negotiation with the Japanese and Korean camp commanders. This places him in complex ethical positions: while seeking to use his proximity to the camp commanders to achieve – if possible – ‘least worst’ outcomes for his men, he also comes to play a role in the camp’s machinery.