The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. Dorrigo Evans would live long enough to see all these changes. And he would remember a time when people were ashamed of crying. When they feared the weakness it bespoke. The trouble to which it led. He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. In his old age Dorrigo Evans never knew if he had read this or had himself made it up. Made

For many years, Dorrigo often thought about Mrs Jackie Maguire, whose real name he never knew, whose real name was like the food he dreamt of every day in the POW camps—there and not there, pressing up into his skull, a thing that always vanished at the point he reached out towards it. And after a time he thought about her less often; and after a further time, he no longer thought about her at all.

in the deepest recesses of his being, Dorrigo Evans understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after. Nothing would ever be as real to him. Life never had such meaning again.

Violence. But the Greeks are our heroes. They win. Why? He didn’t know exactly why.

He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was.

He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He’d just had more success at living than at dying,

I am a part of all that I have met. You

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself. He would think there ought to be some sort of recognition for such achievement. It took a strange courage. It was loathsome. It

The Goanna looked at them working for a moment and very slowly turned away to look elsewhere, as if thinking, and equally slowly turned back.

piece of heavy bamboo for a minute or two,

this camp. They are survivors of grim, pinched

Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this?

nose, Dorrigo Evans said quietly, Quickly.

It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time.

It was all ridiculous, and yet to live, he told himself, demanded above all else a ridiculous belief that you could live.

Shinjuku called it the Shinjuku Rashomon.