Contents Cover About the Book About the Author Also by Richard Flanagan Dedication Title Page Epigraph Part One Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Part Two Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Part Three Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Part Four Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Part Five Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Copyright About the Book ‘The fire was rising at their back, its flames the only living thing, and he thought of her head and her face and her body, the red camellia in her hair, but as hard as he tried now, he could not remember her face.’ In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever Richard Flanagan’s savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost About the Author Born in Tasmania in 1961, Richard Flanagan is one of Australia’s leading novelists His novels, Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting have received numerous honours and been published in 26 countries His father, who died the day Flanagan finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway Also by Richard Flanagan Death of a River Guide The Sound of One Hand Clapping Gould’s Book of Fish The Unknown Terrorist Wanting For prisoner san byaku san jū go (335) The Narrow Road to the Deep North Richard Flanagan away from this stink of decay, the smothering green, the pain and brutal people who simply hated and taught hate, who made the world hate As the boy soldier trudged away, Dorrigo could see he was bleeding about the face where he’d been whipped, that his simple uniform was filthy, torn and mildewed, and that he had no heart for any of this And yet, when called upon, he—this soft-eyed boy with the lamp—he too would kill brutally and in turn be killed The Japanese sergeant who had so savagely beaten him now took a break Watching the column file past into the blackness of the jungle, he lit a cigarette and took a puff When another NCO approached, he handed the smoke to him with a smile and a joke And as the column of children was swallowed by the darkness, Dorrigo Evans felt as if the whole war was passing before his eyes After the column had vanished into the jungle, the rain came in a deluge The sky was black, and other than the few kerosene lanterns and guards’ torches, there was no light The only sound was that of the rain rolling down from the nearby teak trees in gushes, the rain sweeping back and forth, and the rain felt to Dorrigo Evans a solid, moving, living thing, and the rain and the great teak jungle in which their camp sat in that small clearing seemed to form a prison that was endless, unknowable, and slowly killing them all Finally, it was established that all the prisoners were there Dorrigo Evans lifted his lantern and his gaze, worried that he might be giving the impression that he was downcast, his spirit broken by all that they had suffered He could not that to them He had to far worse He looked at the seven hundred men, whom he had held, nursed, cajoled, begged, hoodwinked and organised into surviving, whose needs he always put before his own Most wore only a Jap happy or wretched rags that masqueraded as shorts, and in the greasy, sliding lantern light their skeletal bodies for a moment horrified him Many shook with malaria, some shat themselves as they stood there, and it was his task to find among them one hundred men to march one hundred miles further into the jungle, towards the unknown, into the passage of death Dorrigo Evans looked downwards, and though he could see nothing, it reminded him that few had that one key to survival, boots Holding a lantern at ankle height, he walked slowly along the first row, looking at the bare feet, some badly infected, some swollen with beri-beri, some with stinking ulcers so large and vile that they were like angry craters eating almost to the bone He stopped at one: a severe, untreated ulcer that had left a thin strip of intact skin down the outer side of the calf, the rest of the leg being a huge ulcer from which poured offensive, greyish pus Sloughing tendons and fasciae were exposed, the muscles were tunnelled and separated by gaping sinuses, between which he could glimpse a raw tibial bone that looked as if a dog had gnawed it The bone, too, was starting to rot and break off into flakes He lifted his gaze to see a pale, wasted child No, Chum Fahey could not go Report to hospital when parade has ended, said Dorrigo Evans The next man was Harry Dowling Dorrigo had successfully removed his appendix three months ago, a triumph in such circumstances of which he was proud And now Dowling seemed in not the worst shape He had shoes and his ulcers were only mild Dorrigo looked up at him, put his hand on his shoulder Harry, he said, as gently as he could, as though waking a child I am become a carrion monster The next in line was Ray Hale, whom they had managed to bring through cholera He too Dorrigo touched on the shoulder Ray, he said Thou art come unto a feast of death Ray, he said Dread Charon, frightful and foul And so Dorrigo continued on, up and down the lines of those he had tried to save and now had to pick, touching, naming, condemning those men he thought might best cope, the men who had the best chance of not dying, who would most likely die nevertheless At its end, Dorrigo Evans stepped back and dropped his head in shame He thought of Jack Rainbow, whom he had made to suffer so, Darky Gardiner, whose prolonged death he could only watch And now these hundred men And when he looked up, there stood around him a circle of the men he had condemned He expected the men to curse him, to turn away and revile him, for everyone understood it was to be a death march Jimmy Bigelow stepped forward Look after yourself, Colonel, he said, and put out his hand to shake Dorrigo’s Thanks for everything You too, Jimmy, Dorrigo Evans said And, one by one, the rest of the hundred men shook his hand and thanked him When it was done, he walked off into the jungle at the side of the parade ground and wept 17 what he knows, a nurse said She had seen his dog-black eyes glistening with a life of their own under the neon tubes of the ward I think he hears me, though, she said I Broken as he was, he could recognise that it was a fine room he had been given, looking out on giant fig trees with their flying roots and lush greenery But he did not feel at home It did not feel his place It was not the island of his birth The birds cried differently at dawn, harsh, happy calls of green parrots and gang-gang parrots Not the soft, smaller, more complex trilling of birdsong, of the wrens and honeyeaters and silvereyes of his island home, the fetching return call of the jo-witty, all the birds he now wished to fly and sing with It was not a road rolling from the cup of a woman’s waist over a pewter sea to a rising moon For my purpose holds, he whispered— WE’RE NOT SURE To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die What’s he saying? asked one nurse He’s raving, said a second Better get a doctor It’s the morphine or the end, one or the other, or both Some say nothing, some give up on breathing, some rave As politicians, journalists and shock jocks competed in their ever wilder panegyrics of a man they had never understood, he was dreaming of just one day: of Darky Gardiner and Jack Rainbow, of Tiny Middleton Mick Green Jackie Mirorski and Gyppo Nolan Little Lenny going home to Mum in the Mallee Of one hundred men shaking his hand One thousand others, names recalled, names forgotten, a sea of faces Amie, amante, amour Life piled on life, he mumbled, every word now a revelation, as if it had been written for him, a poem his life and his life a poem Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, —something more something more he had lost some lines somewhere and he no longer knew what the poem was or who had written it, so totally now was the poem him This grey spirit, he thought despondently, or was he remembering?—yes, that was it— And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought And he felt shame and he felt loss and he felt his life had only ever been shame and loss, it was as though the light was now going, his mother was calling out, Boy! Boy! But he could not find her, he was returning to hell and it was a hell he would never escape And he remembered Lynette Maison’s face as she slept, and the Glenfiddich whisky miniatures he had drunk before he left, and Rabbit Hendricks’ illustration of Darky Gardiner sitting in an opulent armchair through which little silver fish swam, in a Syrian village in which Yabby Burrows and his spiked hair was about to dissolve into Syrian dust And somehow it made no sense to him that the picture survived and would be reproduced endlessly, but Yabby Burrows was gone and to his life no future and no meaning could ever be attached There was someone in a blue uniform standing above him Dorrigo wanted to tell him he was sorry, but when he opened his mouth only drool rolled out He was in any case hurtling backwards into an ever faster swirling maelstrom of people, things, places, backwards and round and deeper and deeper and deeper into the growing, grieving, dancing storm of things forgotten or half-remembered, stories, lines of poetry, faces, gestures misunderstood, love spurned, a red camellia, a man weeping, a wooden church hall, women, a light he had stolen from the sun— He remembered another poem, he could see the poem in its entirety, but he did not want to see it or know it; he could see Charon’s burning eyes staring into his but he did not want to see Charon, he could taste the obol being forced into his mouth, he felt the void he was becoming— —and finally he understood its meaning His last words, as witnessed by a Sudanese orderly: Advance forward, gentleman Charge the windowsill He felt a snare tightening around his throat; he gasped and threw a leg out of the bed, where it jerked for a second or two, thumping the steel frame, and died 18 waxed, the slow quarter-moon continued rising through black rungs, the night moaned with many groans and snores Bonox Baker turned up at the officers’ tent with the news of Darky Gardiner’s drowning By the light of a kerosene lantern, Dorrigo Evans entered it in his diary as murder The word seemed inadequate What didn’t? In his small shaving mirror, which lay next to the diary, he glimpsed his frightful reflection, hair hoary and unkempt, fierce eyes lit with fire and a filthy rag hanging around his neck Had he become the ferryman? He turned the mirror upside down It was almost midnight, and he knew he should try to get a few hours’ sleep so he might have the strength to make it through another day He wanted to be first at the dawn parade to meet the hundred men as they arrived and wish them well before they left A bag of mail had arrived that morning with the truck, the first any of them had seen for nine months As ever, the correspondence was random Some men received several letters, many men none There was one letter for Dorrigo Evans from Ella He had intended to wait until now, the end of his day, for the immense pleasure of reading it, so that he might fall asleep with it filling his dreams, but he felt so home sick on seeing the letter when it was handed to him in the morning before the parade he had torn it open and read it there and then He could not believe her news All day it had haunted him Rereading it now at the end of the day he still found it impossible to digest The letter was six months old It ran to several pages Ella wrote that although nothing had been heard from Dorrigo or, for that matter, from his unit for over a year, she knew he was alive The letter talked of her life, of Melbourne in all its mundane detail All this he could believe But unlike other men, who pored over every sentence of their letters and cards from home, only one detail registered with Dorrigo Evans Enclosed with the letter was a newspaper cutting headed ADELAIDE HOTEL TRAGEDY It told of how, after a gas explosion in its kitchen, the King of Cornwall hotel had burnt down with the loss of four lives, including that of the much-respected publican, Mr Keith Mulvaney Another three people were unaccounted for THE LONG NIGHT and believed to have also perished, including two guests and Mrs Mulvaney, the publican’s wife Dorrigo Evans read the newspaper cutting for a third and then a fourth time Outside it was raining again He felt cold He pulled his army blanket round him tighter, and by the light of the kerosene lantern he once more read Ella’s letter One of Daddy’s friends high up made some enquiries for me with the coroner’s office in Adelaide, Ella wrote He said it had now been made official, but because of the tragedy and people’s feelings and morale and all that they’ve kept it out of the paper They had to use teeth Can you imagine? Poor Mrs Keith Mulvaney is now among the confirmed dead I am so sorry, Dorry I know how fond you were of your uncle and aunt Tragedies like this make me realise how lucky I am Mrs Keith Mulvaney? For some time the name made no more sense than the news Mrs Keith Mulvaney She had only ever been Amy to him He had no idea it was a lie, the only lie Ella ever told him He put out the kerosene lantern to conserve fuel and lit the stub of a candle For a long time he watched the flame refusing to die The smoke tapered into tiny smuts that played up and down in the pulsing areolae of candlelight He looked at the light, at the smuts As though there were two worlds This world and a hidden world that was a real world of wild, flying particles spinning, shimmering, randomly bouncing off each other, and new worlds coming into being in consequence One man’s feeling is not always equal to all that life is Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all He stared into the flame Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame He lay down in his haphazard cot After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page But there was nothing—the final pages had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding There was no last page The book of his life just broke off There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above There was to be no peace and no hope And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end He would live in hell, because love is that also He put the book down Unable to sleep, he stood up and went to the edge of the shelter beyond which the rain teemed The moon was lost He relit the kerosene lantern and made his way to the bamboo urinal on the far side of the camp, relieved himself, and on his return noticed growing at the side of the muddy trail, in the midst of the overwhelming darkness, a crimson flower He leant down and shone his lantern on the small miracle He stood, bowed in the cascading rain, for a long time Then he straightened back up and continued on his way This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted inwriting by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly Epub ISBN: 9781448192243 Version 1.0 www.randomhouse.co.uk Published by Chatto & Windus 2014 First published in Australia by Knopf Australia 2013 10 Copyright © Richard Flanagan 2013 Richard Flanagan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Chatto & Windus Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA www.randomhouse.co.uk Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm The Random House Group Limited Reg No 954009 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780701189051 The author gratefully acknowledges the use of the following texts and translations: Poem 5, Catullus, from Bed to Bed, translated by James Michie, Orion, 1967; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner, W W Norton, New York, 2001; The Essential Haiku, edited and translated by Robert Hass, Ecco Press, 1994; Issa and Kikusha-ni haiku from The Sound of Water by Basho, Buson, Issa and Other Poets, translated by Sam Hamill, c 1995 by Sam Hamill, reproduced by arrangement with The Permissions Company Inc., on behalf of Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA, www.shambhala.com; The British Museum Haiku, translated by David Cobb, The British Museum Press, 2002; The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin, 1966; Japanese Death Poems, translated by Yoel Hoffmann, Tuttle Publishing, Boston, 1986; ‘These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)’, lyrics by Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey, c 1976 by Lafleur Music Ltd, reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd Every effort has been made to trace and contact all holders of copyright in quotations If there are any inadvertent omissions or errors, the publishers will be pleased to correct these at the earliest opportunity Table of Contents Cover About the Book About the Author Also by Richard Flanagan Dedication Title Page Epigraph Part One Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Part Two Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Part Three Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Part Four Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Part Five Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Copyright ... they lived mostly on the rabbits they trapped and the wallabies they shot and the potatoes they grew and the bread they baked Their father, who had survived the depression of the 1890s and watched... human They did not think such things They knew them Odd things amazed him Their houses made of stone The weight of their cutlery Their ignorance of the lives of others Their blindness to the beauty... tribal dance Then began the magic of kick to kick One boy would boot the football from his row across the yard to the other row And all the boys in that row would run together at the ball and—if