![]() ![]() ![]() Although this love forms the beating heart of the book, Flanagan doesn't let it lie instead he takes the reader beyond this, exploring what it means to love a family, to love a friend, to love at all. The love of Dorrigo's life, Amy, his uncle's young wife, is a love that is illicit, that falls with a vertiginous sickness one hot, salty summer before Dorrigo ships out. ![]() In opposition to this hellish setting, much of the novel unfolds as a love story of epic, Grecian proportions, set in beachside Adelaide. ![]() The Narrow Road to the Deep North is dedicated to Flanagan's father, prisoner san byaku san ju go (335), the Japanese number given to him as a PoW, one of Weary Dunlop's thousand on the death railway. The book is a howl into the silence of returned servicemen, often told that it is better to forget, to return to life as if nothing has happened – despite the "lest we forget" refrain. They are unrelenting – the naked, skeletal bodies, the moon eyes, and the hats set at a larrikin angle above these distorted faces evokes a hellish theatre. To read the passages describing life on the line is to endure. The telling of the experiences of Dorrigo Evans, the main character, as a doctor in a prisoner-of-war camp on the line, is disturbing and vivid. ![]()
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