Indeed, the title of the novel comes from a book by Basho. The novel begins with epigraphs from Celan (‘Mother, they write poems’) and the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.
Evans is an educated man who loves literature – a long way from the vulgar Les Harding of Romeril’s play – and his interest in literature allows Flanagan to place The Narrow Road to the Deep North in an epic and ennobling literary tradition without too much awkwardness.
While Flanagan’s father may be the basis for one of the minor characters in this novel, probably Jimmy Bigelow, Flanagan chooses a different kind of character for the central role: a doctor called Dorrigo Evans, partly based on Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, one of the heroes of the prison camps. Under the pressure of imprisonment, Flanagan’s Australians are greedy, selfish and erratic, but they are never cause for mockery. It may question the nature of hero-worship, but its central characters are certainly heroes. Richard Flanagan’s father was one of these suffering men and his novel about the aftermath of the POW experience shows a more mature attitude to the veterans than we might have had in the 1970s. 25 years after the war, Les still can’t cope with the Japanese he has joked his way through post-war life without ever managing to quell the ghosts of his dead comrades and the memory of his own suffering on the infamous railway.
Romeril’s Les Harding is in the same ludicrous mould as Barry Humphries’s Les Patterson, but the playwright also grants him the terrible experience of the Thai-Burma railway camps, forcing his audiences to shift from laughter to dismay as this apparently stereotypical returned serviceman breaks down before our eyes. Yet they had undergone suffering we could not imagine. Often intolerant, they seemed xenophobic, ignorant and frequently drunken. They were our fathers, RSL members with patriarchal power, resisting social and political change. Romeril’s play uncomfortably recalls the ambivalent attitude of the post-war generation to the World War II veterans.
I read Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the same week that I saw the Griffin Theatre production of John Romeril’s The Floating World, the classic 1975 play on the legacy of the Australian prisoner of war experience at the hands of the Japanese.
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