He describes how a lost shoe could be the tumbling domino that sealed a fate (foot injury, infection, sepsis), and how small mercies - an egg, an extra portion of gruel, a good sledgehammer that made work go a bit faster - could ensure another day’s survival. He describes the brutal beatings administered by their Japanese captors, the torrential rains that flooded the latrines and accelerated the spread of illness, and the shocking conditions in which the novel’s hero, an Australian doctor named Dorrigo Evans, had to perform surgery on his ailing fellow prisoners. Flanagan delineates the agony of daily life: the hours of grueling labor in the sweltering jungle heat on a starvation diet that left the men - suffering from malnutrition, on top of malaria, dysentery and cholera - divided into two categories, the sick and the dying. “The Narrow Road,” though fiction, is anything but sanitized.
Robert Charles’s “Last Man Out: Surviving the Burma-Thailand Death Railway.” Such harrowing accounts make the fictionalized David Lean movie “ The Bridge on the River Kwai” - which used the building of the Burma Railway as a backdrop - seem gauzily romanticized.
His novel also appears to draw upon published histories, and memoirs like John Coast’s “Railroad of Death” and H.
Flanagan has said in an interview that he spent a lot of time with his father in his final years talking about his experiences working on the “death railway”: about details like “the smell, say, of the ulcer hut” (where men were treated for festering wounds and gangrene) and more abstract things like the meaning of war and love. Although “Narrow Road” turns out to be a deeply flawed novel, the chapters set in an Australian prisoner of war railway camp demonstrate his ability - showcased so brilliantly in his 2002 novel “ Gould’s Book of Fish,” about a 19th-century forger and thief sentenced to 49 years in Tasmania’s notorious Sarah Island prison - to communicate both the abominations that men are capable of inflicting upon one another, and the resilience many display in the face of utter misery.
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