The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Here is the cover of the paperback I have just been reading.

It's not about the girl, although she is important, but that picture of a made-up woman is just - no.

It is about the man, but he shouldn't be wearing a new uniform and be looking down. He should be bony and wearing tatters and standing upright in spite of that. His hands shouldn't be dangling and useless. He should be looking tense, wary ... it's a terrible cover for a serious book.

Some approximation of this scene would have been more truthful

This map would have helped with the geography

This shows the achievement of the men of all the races who did the engineering and building.

Oh it is such an affecting book. It is about war and peace, life and death, trying to make sense of years of suffering that don't make sense. It is about damaged lives and the puzzle of why they have to be that way.

The extraordinary thing is that no person in the book is an out-and-out monster, although there are times when the Japanese seem to be. There is always a backstory and all the characters are complex and capable of changing. The prisoners come out of Tasmania and other parts of Australia, and they have lived through a world depression - they're not educated men and they are distinctly Australian, with their practicality, mate-ship and their ability to make do. How the doctor fashions catheters from shards of bamboo, for example...how they manage to distill water to fashion a drip ...how they manage to steal things.

This war separated men from women, but in Australia, I think, that's fairly normal. Men there are about the outdoors and farm animals and machinery, whereas women have a traditional role around the family and social life, but of course, at this time that separation was true of all the world. When Flanagan writes of Dorrigo Evans and his heroism, he is writing about something that separates men from women. I don't think that loneliness - a terrible loneliness - is now possible in so acute a form.

There are glimpses in the book of women - for example, comfort women - who also suffer at the hands of the Japanese, but the book is about men and their capacity to inflict suffering and to suffer - and survive.