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.

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

Nearly everyone in the UK who was literate in the 1950s and early 1960s has read this book. This was the generation who knew about the horrors of war, and in an understated way it expresses their frustration with their post-war lives and their hope that Australia would be better. Certainly, that's how it worked upon my mother. who loved romances set in the outback, a genre much favoured by the Woman's Weekly. Shute was a man of his time: he wrote in a dry, controlled way -  a complete contrast to Ruth Park's dancing adjectives. (see previous post).

I re-read this book because I thought the girlie, who is on her travels, should read it to know about how Australia was in the 1950's, and I wanted to remind myself of its flavour. There are 2 parts to it and a frame - a narrator telling the story. He is the elderly solicitor who is executor to a Will - a large sum of money is left in trust to an obscure young typist. But she (Jean Paget) has an extraordinary back story, having been in Malaya when it was overrun by the Japanese army, and having been part of a group of women and children who walked from place to place across Malaya until they died or found a place that would accept them. The English women and children stayed in a village there tending to rice paddies for 3 years.

In her Malayan troubles, Jean met a brave young Australian prisoner called Joe Harman, who suffered horribly for his generosity towards her, and she has never forgotten him. With the money she inherits, she goes back to Malaya to build a well for the village women, and there she is amazed to find that Joe has survived the war. So... she goes to Australia to find him.

The second part of the story takes place in Australia. It is interesting in a completely different way from the first - but they are both linked by the same tribute to the spirit of practicality and resilience that Jean and Joe have.

The problem for me is the narrator. He tells you all about his life and it is screamingly dull, I suppose as a foil to the exciting stories he has to tell. He breakfasts, he goes to work, he dines at his club with other old bufties, he wants to tell you all about trusts and codicils and investments. Wah! The story unfolds in spite of his seemingly endless prevarications and wooden style.

Whatever made Shute decide to tell the story that way? It is so odd. But he must have thought that the decent and prudish old boy added something - and when you step back and think about it, perhaps it does. The commercial world needs someone to be interested in all the dry stuff in small print that keeps money transactions lawful. He represents civil society, maybe, which is the backbone of so much that we value, although Shute also celebrates the spirit of free enterprise and the self-reliance that Jean and Joe display.

So in short, I would still recommend it.