Narrow Thoughts on a Deep Issue

Having tried reviewing films, I'd like to try reviewing a novel - and a Man Booker Prize winning novel at that. For Christmas, a friend gave me a copy of "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", by the Australian writer, Richard Flanagan. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2014, impressing the judges greatly: "...this year a masterpiece has won it" (A. C. Grayling, Chair of judges).  I was prepared to be sceptical after reading that, but I need not have been. The book is a fascinating account of an Australian doctor, Dorrigo Evans, who is captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, and becomes a hero to the Australian public after the end of the war because of the care he gives to his patients and fellow prisoners on the infamous "Death Railway" in Burma, on which so many POWs laboured, suffered and died under a brutal Japanese prison regime. Flanagan's own father was a survivor of this protracted atrocity.  Arifa Akbar commented in "The Independent":
"The anguish that Flanagan felt over the PoW experience, and the need for emotional catharsis, was not solely rooted in his father's trauma. (His father in a tragic twist of fate, died aged 98, on the day the novel was completed). Flanagan also drew on his own anguish: "I felt I carried something within me as a consequence of growing up as a child of the death railway. People come back from cosmic trauma but the wound does not end with them. It passes on to others."
Reading the sections of the book that deal with Dorrigo Evans' horrific experiences in Japanese captivity, I was struck by their vividness and capacity to shock, even after having spent decades reading of War and its attendant evils. This shows that Flanagan listened long and attentively to his father and other survivors of Japanese captivity. In fact, these sections of the book bear a strong resemblance to a book by another Australian author, Russell Braddon - "The Naked Island". Braddon, like Flanagan's father and Dorrigo Evans, was captured at Singapore and endured the same treatment from the Japanese. At times, I thought I was reading the same book. Susan Lever, in the "Sydney Review of Books" notes of Flanagan's book:
"Evans’s memories are triggered by the task of writing the foreword for a collection of sketches done by Guy ‘Rabbit’ Hendricks, one of the men who died in the camps."
I wonder if Flanagan had Braddon's book in mind when he invented this character, as the cartoonist Ronald Searle was a fellow-prisoner with Braddon on the Death Railway and, after liberation, published a book of sketches about "life" in Japanese captivity. Searle, unlike Hendricks, survived.
Dorrigo Evans conducts himself heroically in the camps, treating his patients with care, skill and pitifully inadequate resources, doing his best to provide comfort for the surviving and the dying (of whom there are plenty). No wonder post-war Australia treats him as a hero.
Evans, however, is not without his faults. Before going to war, he has a passionate affair with his uncle's wife, and hundreds more adulterous affairs after he becomes famous. Flanagan is moralising here, consciously or otherwise. At least, he is telling us that light and shade exist in all people, and that good men can serve bad causes and vice versa.
He further exemplifies this by his portrayal of his Japanese and Korean guard characters, and their fates after the war. Akbar again:
"Flanagan's book does not just trace Dorrigo's inner world, but gives his Japanese "torturers" and camp commanders a voice, and a subjectivity, that incorporates humanity and tenderness, rather than a black-and-white evil."
Flanagan also points towards the post-war readiness of Allied commanders to forgive and forget some hideous Japanese atrocities, which rival any Nazi atrocities for sheer horror - the vivisection of living American airmen without anaesthetic at Kyushu University.  As Sato, one of these criminals, says in the book:
"...neither our government nor the Americans want to dig up the past. The Americans are interested in our biological warfare work; it helps them prepare for war against the Soviets".
Flanagan even visited the commander of his father's prison camp, describing him as a "gentle, gracious old man". His father too:
""He brought us up not to hate, never to judge. He had no hate [for the Japanese]. What my father took out of the camps was this extraordinary sense that everything is an illusion except for what you are like with other people, and to never think other people are in any way lesser than you."
I find that very noble, and admit that I could not be like that. Nor was this view common among other ex-prisoners of the Japanese after the war. Many, if not most, soldiers of all Allied armies belonging to the nations who fought the Japanese in the front lines felt an enduring, visceral hatred. In his book on the Battle of Kohima, "Road of Bones - The Siege of Kohima 1944", Feargal Keane tells of a British veteran who could not rid himself of his loathing for the Japanese until, years later, as an ordained clergyman, he baptised an Anglo-Japanese baby.
If I have a major criticism of the book, it is that it does seem to tend towards a type of moral relativism of the "We're all as bad as one another" or"There's good and bad in all kinds" type of cliché. This is especially prevalent in "revisionist" historians of World War Two, who like to point out Allied excesses as being "as bad as" those of the Axis powers - all of which is completely wrong. As Herbert Marcuse pointed out in another context: "There is a difference between Red Terror and White Terror". Further - there is a difference between the Allied aerial bombing of Germany and the Holocaust; between the sinking of convoys to Britain and the sinking of U-Boats; between the multitudinous atrocities of the Japanese and the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In fairness to Richard Flanagan, he has not stated the moral relativist case explicitly, but the implication seems to be there.
I realise that this is not a "normal" book review, but the fact remains that, as George Orwell, Mao Zedong and Leon Trotsky said : "All art is propaganda" - and every artist of every medium has a "message". For a more literary type of critique, I point the reader to a review by Michael Hoffman in the London Review of Books. Here is a flavour of it:
"The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution. It is as though the contemporary novel – like film (4-D, coming soon to a cinema near you), like theatre, like so much else – is in competition with itself, falling over itself to offer you more interiority, more action, more understanding, more vision. But the form, the vessel, is an exploded form; it is basically rubble, fragmentary junk, debris. It’s not even leaky anymore; it can hold nothing"
Happy reading for those who like this kind of thing! Personally, I think it should be sent to "Pseud's Corner" in "Private Eye".
No, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" is an important and moving book, well worth reading, despite its flaws (or my criticisms).