Thursday, October 16, 2014

Richard Flanagan's Booker-winning novel is a love story disguised as a war story - movie to follow?

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which has won the Man Booker Prize 2014, begs for a screen adaptation 

“In trying to escape the fatality of memory,” Richard Flanagan writes towards the end of his Man Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, “he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably leads to greater loss.” The “he” in that sentence is Dorrigo Evans, the book’s Tasmanian protagonist, a surgeon who has seen the horrors of a Japanese Prisoner of War camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway.

Richard Flanagan has spoken in the months since this book was published about the twin true stories on which it was based. One - the POW experience - was his father’s, a story Flanagan wanted to write as a tribute to him, and one he found impossible to write for 12 years, thanks to that pressure. As he pointed out recently, between 100,000 and 200,000 people died building the Thai-Burma Death Railway, “more corpses than there are words in my novel”.

The war story was rescued, in a sense, by a love story, told to Flanagan by his parents and reinterpreted for this book. The haunting of that lost love, and its later second loss, provides the book with its frame, and its heart.
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