Richard Flanagan
Hardback
464 pages
ISBN 978-0385352857
Richard Flanagan's 2014 Booker Prize-winning function nigh the Burmese railroad fiasco pulls off its brazen trace a fast i on of appropriating - occupying, if you lot volition - the championship of the Japanese haiku chief Basho's dandy travelogue Oku no hosomichi. But it fails to acquire peradventure the greatest lesson of the medium: less is more. Its 464 pages, acre ofttimes filled alongside arresting images, are nigh a hundred likewise many for its purpose; or maybe the occupation is that the novel, much similar its poor protagonist, is unsure of its purpose, as well as thence marches on doggedly inwards a maze of blind alleys long later it should bring packed it in.
While the novel treads the well-blazed path of the allied prisoner-of-war sense at the hands of pitiless Japanese soldiers (in the footsteps of such classics as The Seed as well as the Sower as well as The Bridge Over the River Kwai), this fourth dimension it focuses on Australians' as well as Japanese' perspectives.
Ironically it is non the hellish details of deprivation as well as depravity that run a jeopardy turning off the reader, only rather the hackneyed storey of forbidden dearest that is overly intrusive at a fourth dimension when the novel should hold out consolidating its narrative direction.
This second-rate melodrama of a frustrated immature married adult woman betraying her lumbering older hubby for his surgeon nephew pales against the POWs' hard-earned solidarity inwards the aspect upwards of suffering, as well as produces howlers such as this candidate for the Bulwer-Lytton prize:
"Afterwards, he remembered exclusively their bodies, ascent as well as falling alongside the crash of waves, brushed past times the ocean breezes that ruffled the sand dune tops as well as raked the ash that ate his abandoned cigarette."
Excepting such surfeits of relative clauses as well as personification, Flanagan is inwards fact at his best inwards his observations of the indifferent fabric globe that envelopes human suffering, as well as of the suffering itself, hold out it at the hands of their ain banality as well as thwarted sense of self (the Australians), or of a cruel samurai code evoked inwards country of war (the Japanese). Attendant is a portrayal of the frightening ability of language, mutual to British as well as Japanese poetry, as well as Mein Kampf, to channel the human spirit into as boundless nobility or sadism.
Thus it is that Basho's haiku ennobling the human aesthetic instinct - "Even inwards Kyoto / when I hear the cuckoo / I long for Kyoto" - is twisted past times a Japanese colonel whose assured racial superiority is licence for an orgy of beheading of the dehumanised Chinese 'enemy': "Even inwards Manchukuo / when I encounter a cervix / I long for Manchukuo."
Flanagan risks ridicule inwards employing the quintessential Japanese artform against itself, only such damning juxtapositions work, much as the Nazis condemned themselves past times listening to Beethoven acre overseeing the Holocaust. The betoken is that aesthetic sensibility is no substitute for human decency. The haunted regular army surgeon Dorrigan Evans realises (or as Flanagan intones advertizing nauseam, "understands") that nigh himself, fifty-fifty as he seeks solace, if non guidance, inwards the beauty of others' words throughout his bemused, empty life.
Though it is non a novel insight, Flanagan is correct to reiterate - writing as he is amidst a rejuvenated era of revisionist right-wing politics, non exclusively inwards Nippon - that the starving human being who gives one-half his meagre rice slop to a beau sufferer is to a greater extent than eloquent inwards his gesture of universal human solidarity than a m poems lauding the unique spirit of a especial race. But sadly Flanagan felt the postulate to embroider what was essentially his laconic father's true-life sense as a prisoner of war alongside an amorous counterpoint, rendering the eloquent logorrheic as well as sending the narrative off-track into the jungle mud.
Richard Donovan
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