War Crimes - from the Narrow Road to the Deep North

This is a passage about the time after the war, when one of the guards on the Burmese Railway - a Korean - is waiting to be hanged for his treatment of the POWs.

Choi Sang-min noticed how every man at Changi conceived of his destiny differently and invented his past accordingly. Some men had point-blank denied the charges, but they were hanged or were imprisoned for lengthy periods anyway. Some had accepted responsibility but refused to recognise the authority of the Australian trials. They too were hanged or imprisoned for greater or lesser periods. Others denied responsibility, pointing out the impossibility of a lowly guard or soldier refusing to recognise the authority of the Japanese military system, far less refusing to do the Emperor's will. In private they asked a simple question. If they and all their actions were simply expressions of the Emperor's will, why then was the Emperor still free? Why did the American support the Emperor but hang them, who had only ever been the Emperor's tools?

But in their hearts they all knew that the Emperor would never hang and that they would. Just as surely as they had beaten and tortured and killed for the Emperor, the men who didn't accept responsibility were now to hang for the Emperor. They hanged as well and as badly as the men who accepted responsibility or the men who said they never did any of it, for as they jiggled about beneath the trapdoor one after another, their legs jerked all the same....

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.

Reading for the book club

I have been enjoying my sojourn with Virginia Woolf. I liked "To the Lighthouse" although I got on better with the first part than the second. Then I tried "Jacob's Room" which I could see was not as successful as the other, greater novels, because it was earlier and she was feeling her way with her impressionistic technique, which meant that some of the time it was hard to understand what on earth was going on. Jacob was there as a blocky smudge, as his impressions of others and their impressions of him.

Then I went to the book club book: "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan, and its ideas of what matters enough to record, and what is the truth, are so entirely different that it knocks one's head sideways. But here there's a boldness and confidence about what matters that's dizzying and the writer has no truck with gentleness. It's as though the bright colours and reality of hard Australian trees and extreme climate has trained him to write in a hard, bright way.

Yet there are surprising similarities about what matters, Flanagan writes about death and VW was no stranger to death; before she was eighteen her mother, sister, brother and father had died; it seemed that they were always at deathbeds, and grief and bereftness comes into the three books I have read - that intrusive, unnecessary bloody death in "Mrs Dalloway" for example.. VW felt the importance of returning to reading the classics, like Flanagan's protagonist.  Flanagan is struggling with the truth just as much as Virginia Woolf, he is also asking what is true, for example, about heroism.

Sometimes in my life, what is given as truth and what I understand as truth are very different, and I think, I must record that, I must write this discrepancy down -  and I don't support the idea that there is no truth. I look sideways and I say nothing, but I know what is true. But I may be seen as a different character whose version of the truth is distorted.

It's a mast year again, and all the oak trees are productive together - acorns fall on my roof from time to time and I like to hear that clunk and roll.