The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North takes its title from a famous piece of Japanese literature Okuno Hosomichi written by Matsuo Basho in 1689, when the poet embarked upon a journey from Edo (modern Tokyo) to the north of the country. Basho recorded his 1500-mile journey in 'haibun', a style of prose and haiku. Basho commented 'every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.'

I wonder if that was the sentiment of Dorrigo Evans, the protagonist of Flanagan's account of Japanese prisoners of war building the Burma Railway? Dorrigo is an officer and a doctor in charge of the camp hospital. His men are suffering not only the cruel realities of life in the jungle, but also the incredibly brutal conditions of their captors. Every day is a fight to survive the camp's harsh conditions, and every day Dorrigo has to confront his Japanese counterpart and negotiate how many men will join the railway working party for the day. Most of the men are dying or riddled with tropical diseases, and all of them are starving. But it is during this critical mental arithmetic exercise (critical for his men) that Dorrigo's mind becomes clouded with the image of Amy, his uncle's wife that he has been having an affair with. But now when he thinks of Amy he can no longer remember her face – he can only remember the dust motes that clouded his vision when he first met her in a second hand bookshop. When dust motes sparkle in the light it is like millions of tiny diamonds floating up to heaven.

Flanagan's love story juxtaposes the inhumane conditions of war with an unpredictable and passionate love affair. Flanagan graphically describes the brutality of one human being to another, and he exposes the destructiveness of human nature for the sake of obedience and deference. The portrayal of the Japanese officers' attitude to their mission - fulfilling the Japanese Emperor's command to construct a railway linking Thailand to Burma at any human cost - starkly contrasts with Basho's deeply aesthetic poetry. There is the description of Colonel Kota with his sword poised to decapitate Darky Gardiner, desperately trying to recite a haiku. His inability to finish the poem saves Darky from losing his head. But not for long. Later, Fukuhara is ordered to give Darky a severe and fatal beating, and in the middle of it he is forced to recite a poem; 'A world of pain – if the cherry blossoms, it blossoms.'

Through the individual stories of each prisoner we are touched by their live stories and their survival mechanisms. It is Darky Gardiner whose demise is the need to relieve himself in the latrines, in which he ultimately drowns. Nakamura tries to maintain his dignity in front of his men by commanding Darky's severe beating for the sake of his own vanity. And even in the opening scene we see Dorrigo refusing a piece of steak in order to feed those with greater need, a sacrifice that he must make to assert his authority over them . . .

After the war has ended, those who survive pick up their lives and try to live as normally as possible. Both Amy and Dorrigo believe that the other has died. Dorrigo spots Amy one day in a crowded street, but he continues walking. They are never re-united, but Dorrigo's dying memory is the crimson flower that Amy was wearing in her hair the day that they met that day in the bookshop . . .

 

By the 1980's, when I went to live and work in Japan, little was said about of the atrocities of the Burma Railway, and I  didn't have much idea about Japan's role in the Second World War. But having read this story I have come to realise why my family, in particular my grandfather, couldn't really understand why I would want to visit this country and meet its people. My experience of Japan, its culture and its people was of course very different. By referring back to Basho's poetry, Richard Flanagan, whose father was a POW on the railway, is attempting to reconcile the high and low points of Japanese culture.

Thousand Pieces of Gold

I'm not sure what the rules are regarding the titles of books but it was surely unfortunate that there are two books with the same title - the other on Chinese proverbs which three of us bought by mistake and one even read a good deal of.

Sadly the film did not live up to expectations. The book tells a far more interesting story. Do we blame the script writer? To make matters worse the audio sync was appalling and got worse as the film progressed so much that we could lip read their speech seconds after they had actually said it - many seconds!
There is certainly a feeling with the film that politics was involved in its making and I'm not sure why. A new film could well be written covering many of the social and moral issues illuminated by Polly's life ending with the honour bestowed upon her by the State of making her home a National Heritage site - not many people share this,

Though some of the writing is a little amateurish the book is an easy read and we enjoyed it. None of us knew either Polly's story or indeed much about the slavery that still existed into the early 20th Century in America. How many Chinese men went to work on the mines and railways? were they indentured labour? how do they compare with the  Mexican (Latino) workers of today viz a  viz voting rights, becoming citizens, living conditions or with African Americans or Native Americans?
And what became of them - were they finally absorbed into the melting pot that is the US or did many have to return?

Details of Lalu's early life are sketchy and based on an interview she gave in the 1920's - even her ethnicity is unclear though in the film it is cited as Mongolian but this is not corroborated in the book.
She was passed from her father (the heart-breaking scene of her father returning home with his hands over his ears in the film is perhaps its most moving moment) -to a number of men and women for most of her life - until she came to rest with Charlie Bemis. Yet she remained a strong, kind, immensely proud and generous woman. It is easy to see how she earned the respect of the mining community with its rough drinking men.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee

Tuesday 13^th January 2015

To herald in the New Year we followed last year’s reading of Cider with Rosie with Lee’s next book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was an appropriate antidote to the cold weather, basked in the heat haze of the Spanish plains. The book begins where Cider with Rosie ends. Laurie is 19 and leaving home to make his way in the world. Pretty much penniless he walks his way to London where he works on a building site shifting barrow loads of cement. The book is set in 1934, and Lee’s description of London in the 30s is vivid as he trapes the streets.  The £1 left in his pocket after his rent is paid, is enough to live like a King “a tot of whiskey cost sixpence,……. suits made to measure for fifty bob”.  Becoming unemployed he decides to take a boat to Spain and arrives in Vigo at the beginning of the Spanish summer, and his walk begins. Youthfully underprepared with thick boots, no hat, one sentence of Spanish, and his violin wrapped in a blanket he steps out into the vision of Spain unfolding before him. As with Cider with Rosie we were compelled to read out the vivid descriptions of the country; “Valladolid: a dark square city hard as its syllables – a shut box”, towards Segovia and Madrid: “After the shuttered town, the landscape seemed to have broken from prison and rolled free and glittering away”, Madrid: “and I slipped into it as into the jaws of a lion. It had a lion’s breath too; something fetid and spicy, mixed with straw and the decayed juices of meat”. The people Lee meets are equally vivid, among them beggars, drunken inn keepers, poets (Roy Campbell), and anarchists. Within all the descriptions is the undercurrent of the devastating poverty in 1930’s Spain, the lack of work, idleness and helplessness. He gives dispassionate details, letting the reader make up their own minds about why this had happened and whom to blame.

The walk continues as he travels from the north through the central plains to the coast to Malaga where he spends the winter at a coastal village, Almuñécar. The last chapters describe the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, and the spontaneous organisation (and sadly the lack of it) of militia groups, their passion and doomed optimism. In the last chapter Laurie is rescued by a British destroyer sent out from Gibraltar, but returns some months later to fight with the Republicans.

The book has a dark thread, the subject does not lean to jollity, and Lee wrote it when he was in his 40s.  However, he still maintained a sense of immediacy, and we wondered if Lee had written a journal on the journey.

We found the book a distinctive record of pre-revolutionary Spain, describing the depravations of a little changed feudal society, governed by the aristocracy and the Church.

And how a loose grasp of communist principles, channelled the peasants’ depravations into a cause to fight for. It made us think about the divided population. How there was little geographic mobility, how families staid together within their own culture, and language, and how this relative autonomy, made them reluctant to leave and passionate to defend their homes.

We ended considering a walk in Spain.

Our Xmas dinner

We did a sort of desert islands choice this year - with each person not needing to take the Bible if they so wished. 

Sheila

Dictionary with a magnifying glass.

Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera by Fred Plotkin, Placido Domingo.

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas with the Richard Burton recording.

Luxury: sun cream and a self-fluffing towel.

Chris

Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

Swiss Family Robinson, unabridged, by Johann Rudolf Wyss

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Instead of the Bible – The Nations Favourite Poems

Luxury: bed

Jo

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
The Prophet - Kalil Gibran

Luxury: never-ending diary and supply of pencils.

Donna

First edition Geographers’ A-Z Atlas of London and Suburbs with House Numbers, produced under the direction of Phyllis Pearsall.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford

Maus by Arte Spiegleman

Luxury: bath with continual running hot water and equally self-fluffing towels as Sheila.

Caroline

Smile for the Camera by James Gray

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

Luxury: iPad to view photos and compile crossword puzzles.

Bridget

To Kill and Mocking Bird by Harper Lee

Fairy Books Collection of Andrew Lang

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Luxury: hot shower and the another self-fluffing towel

Marion

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A book about code breaking

The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten

The largest possible book about plant identification/a global compendium of flora and fauna

Luxury: pair of tweezers.

Also mentioned 

Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee

Cider with Rosie is a memoir of a childhood. We are taken on a journey from the time he and his family move to Slad, an isolated Cotswold village. We are introduced to his chaotic but loving family life, learn of the shock of school, his adventures with the opposite sex and his part in mischievous acts. He tells of growing up without a father, his relationships with his mother, sisters and friends, as he moves toward manhood. We hear of his sexual awakening with Rosie, this loss of innocence and naivety and what it was like when he finally lost the characteristics that made him the sweet boy he introduces at the start.

  In the first chapter Lee describes a three year old's  perception and misconceptions: small in relation to objects around him, for example when he got lost in the grass, on the family's arrival at their new home, "I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight". His sense of adventure is communicated through the use of metaphors and similes. He describes things in a very simple, natural way that makes you feel you are there in his world. He uses wonderful descriptive detail and our discussion drew similarities with Dylan Thomas and Thomas Hardy.

  Whilst surrounded by a loving family, he tells of the harshness of ceasing to be the youngest child. "I grew a little tougher, a little colder, and turned my attention more to the outside world, which was now emerging visibly through the mist". Lee says he grew a little tougher, as a result of not been allowed to sleep in his mother's bed and he thought this was the end of the world. But he was growing up and soon realised that there are other things in life for him to discover: school, friends, girls and the wonderful local characters and all their history. We particularly loved the Grannies and their relationship despite never talking to each other, how different they were and how they were able to teach the boys so much about the older generation.

  We speculated if Lee's encounter with Rosie was a key theme in his childhood as he used this memory as the title. Laurie Lee has written about the coming of age of the nation as well as the boy.  The book gives a detailed account of a childhood that seemed filled full with fun, adventure and typical childhood mischief. Yet it is also about loss: loss of traditions, of innocence, of his father and the loss those who never returned from the war.

  This charming, autobiographical novel, peopled with characters we all liked drew pictures of a rural  world and upbringing, whilst long gone had elements that we recognised from our own childhoods.

An October walk in Slad

This was billed as a flat 4 mile walk.  Here are some photos taken by Donna (her copyright). Two people didn't come and two gave up and went and sat in the pub in Sheepscombe and had a laugh. It turned out to be a warm sunny day with some wind however, by 5.30 there was driving rain to drive home through.

The White Woman on a Green Bicycle - Monique Roffey

George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad in 1956 intending to stay for two years. They stay for fifty and raise their family there. Although Sabine dislikes it intensely, her husband is very much at home and this is the cause of considerable unhappiness in their marriage. Sabine makes quite an impression in the early years. A beautiful woman of French descent she makes a striking picture riding around on her green bicycle. But life on the island wears her down and she becomes argumentative and disagreeable. The story covers their life on the island, their relationship with their children and each other, and Sabine’s obsession with Eric Williams, a local politician to whom she writes hundreds of letters, all unsent, as a way of unburdening her frustrations and unhappiness. The novel starts with their later years when George is a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian writing all the upbeat, good news stories the younger journalists won’t touch. The corruption in Trinidad, where there is no justice or opportunity for the native population, is illustrated in Talbot’s vicious beating by the police at the beginning. The early chapters cover George and Sabine’s strained, tortured relationship, George’s discovery of Sabine’s letters to Williams and his unsuccessful attempt to help Talbot, the son of their maid. George’s humiliation at the hands of the police is followed by his illness and his death and Sabine’s shooting of Bobby Comacho.

   Then the story goes back to their early life, its unhappiness and complications. Sabine hates Trinidad: George loves it and becomes a wealthy landowner and minor celebrity. After the attack on his house and the devastating attack on his dogs, George agrees to leave but they miss the boat and are fated to stay. The description of the island and the complex family relationships and the language draw the reader in to the story. Musical Venus is wonderful. The story covers so many aspects of life too:race, relationships, families, expat communities, politics and religion. There is much love and hate in the book. Bobby Comacho is vile. He stands for the state of things that were supposedly going to get better post-colonialism. For Sabine he epitomised all that had gone wrong with Trinidad. Her crime is shocking but understandable. Overall a good read.