THE TITLE OF Richard Flanagan's sixth novel comes from a 17th-century Japanese classic, a little book by the poet Basho that mixes a prose travel narrative with haiku in its account of a long journey on foot. Basho went north from present-day Tokyo through a mountainous land of often shattering beauty. Yet his walk was marked by moments of terrible loneliness, and he seemed to travel under a kind of compulsion, without a defined goal or purpose. Basho walks because he must, and in reading him the old cliché comes alive: Life is a journey. Whether that journey has any meaning, whether there's anything beyond putting one foot in front of the other...well, that's another question entirely. Flanagan's Dorrigo Evans, a young medical officer, seems at first to travel a different path. His narrow road is a railway, and he labors too under a different compulsion, one that takes the shape of the Japanese Army. For Dorrigo - the name comes from a town in New South Wales - is a prisoner of war, among the more than 9,000 Australians who in 1943 slaved on what was called the "Death Railway." A train line cut through the jungles of Burma and Thailand, that "Pharaonic project" killed nearly 100,000 of the Allied prisoners and impressed Asian laborers who were forced to build it. Flanagan's own father was among the survivors, but the story told in this grave and lovely novel bears little resemblance to the one the French writer Pierre Boulle offered in the early 1950s in "The Bridge Over the River Kwai." Both Boulle's work and David Lean's Oscar-winning film adaptation have long been challenged for their historical inaccuracy, and by my count Flanagan uses the word "Kwai" exactly twice. He has something much deeper than revisionism on his mind, though, something even deeper than his pungent account of the prisoners' life on "the Line." Dorrigo will read the haiku poet Shisui, who to mark his own death took his brush and painted a circle. His favorite poem, however, is Tennyson's "Ulysses," a dramatic monologue whose speaker is "a part of all that I have met" and yet believes that life's meaning lies just beyond his grasp, in the worlds he has still to travel. Ulysses knows he has "become a name" for one who roams always "with a hungry heart." No experience can satisfy him, no honors either, and so it will be for Dorrigo. Born in Tasmania, like Flanagan himself, he uses a scholarship to get himself to medical school and joins the army as World War II begins. His unit surrenders to the Japanese in Java, and in post-war Australia he will become famous for his work in the prison camp, for the leadership that ensures the survival of most of the men in his command. And he hates his fame - hates the idea of virtue in general and of his own in particular, hates the idea that those months of struggle have come to define his entire life. Dorrigo too is a part of all that he has met, which doesn't mean that everything he encounters has become a part of him. Flanagan has done something difficult here, creating a character who is at once vivid and shadowy. In his long postwar life, Dorrigo will see his own moments of heroism as if performed by someone else. He fulfills his duty while remaining separate from it, and as a husband and father is most often an absent presence. For Flanagan doesn't limit himself to the war. The novels of Tennyson's day often took the form of biography, and so does this one. But its path is far from linear, and Flanagan will cut back and forth in Dorrigo's life: the prison camp, his childhood, a prewar love affair, and then half a century forward. Only on the book's last pages do we understand the moment in camp that irreparably damaged Dorrigo's life, and only then will we see that this trauma has little to do with the camp. Flanagan manages these shifts in time and perspective with extraordinary skill. They're never confusing but they are dizzying, and demand the reader's full attention in a way that reminds me of Conrad. I suspect that on rereading, this magnificent novel will seem even more intricate, more carefully and beautifully constructed. And those formal demands aren't the only ones it makes. Early in the book and late in his life, Dorrigo will tell a mistress he can no longer remember the face of a soldier called Darky Gardiner. The Japanese beat him and he died "and there was no point to it at all." Two hundred pages later we will watch as Darky, by then the most memorably drawn of Dorrigo's soldiers, is kicked and pummeled and left to drown in a pool of excrement. A scene in which Dorrigo tries to cut away a soldier's gangrenous leg is worthy of Zola, sparing us nothing as the doctor searches in the ruins of the man's body for a bit of artery to clamp. "The world is," Dorrigo will think many years later. "It just is." Still, the book's most disturbing pages are those in which Flanagan follows the postwar lives of Dorrigo's captors. The camp's commandant, Major Nakamura, kills a boy in the ruins of Tokyo and buys a new identity that allows him to escape prosecution as a war criminal. A teenage Korean camp guard isn't so lucky. The Japanese think of Choi Sang-min as just one step above the "enemy soldiers who had surrendered because they were too cowardly to kill themselves." They view him with contempt, the prisoners with hatred; the boy goes in fear of them all, and knows he will be punished for showing any restraint. Are these people evil? Some of them. The others merely do evil things. Yet Flanagan isn't interested in anything as simple as humanizing the enemy. They too are ground within the impersonal processes of history, trapped on a wheel from which there is but one escape. The Allies will hang Choi Sang-min; he won't understand why, worried instead that he's owed back pay. Flanagan is best known for his 2001 novel, "Gould's Book of Fish," a grandiloquent oddity, half "Tristram Shandy" and half "Moby-Dick," about the early history of Australia. His language here seems restrained by comparison, and yet it carries a sinewy incantatory power. On a spree after the war, some of Dorrigo's men "drank to make themselves feel as they should feel when they didn't drink, that way they had felt when they hadn't drunk before the war. For that night they felt ferocious and whole and not yet undone." But they are. None will have the lives they should have had, not even Dorrigo, who dislikes the pleasure he takes in his own fame. Basho wrote that "Days and months are travelers of eternity," and Flanagan's book, like the poet's own, will push us far down that path. This "Narrow Road to the Deep North" is both unforgiving and generous, a paradox that should earn it some fame of its own. Are these people evil? Some of them. The others merely do evil things. MICHAEL GORRA'S most recent book is "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece." He teaches English at Smith College.

Acclaimed Australian author Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish, 2002) here gives us surgeon Dorrigo Evans, from his Tasmanian childhood to old age, along the way having been a POW (as Flanagan's father was) on the gruesomely brutal building of the Siam-Burma railroad and having later achieved a fame he feels is undeserved. Flanagan handles the horrifyingly grim details of the wartime conditions with lapidary precision and is equally good on the romance of the youthful indiscretion that haunts Evans. This accomplished tale of love and war could have broad appeal, but the protracted particulars of the prisoners' treatment may put off quite a few readers. Evans performs at one point a major medical procedure under such primitive and inhuman conditions that it will make even tough-minded readers cringe in disgust. Though much of this fine novel (whose title is taken from the Japanese poet Basho) is extraordinarily beautiful, intelligent, and sharply insightful (and even balanced the Japanese captors are portrayed, not sympathetically, but with dimension), it is very strong and powerful medicine indeed.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist

A literary war novel with asplit personality, about a protagonist who loathes his dual character.Ambition leads to excess in thesixth novel by Flanagan (Wanting, 2009, etc.), a prizewinning writer much renowned in his nativeAustralia. The scenes of Australian POWs held by the Japanese have power anddepth, as do the postwar transformations of soldiers on both sides. But thenovel's deep flaw is a pivotal plot development that aims at the literaryheights of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary but sounds too oftenlike a swoon-worthy bodice ripper. "His pounding head, the pain in everymovement and act and thought, seemed to have as its cause and remedy her, andonly her and only her and only her," rhapsodizes Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon whowill be hailed as a national hero for his leadership in World War II, though hefeels deeply unworthy. His obsession is Amy, a woman he met seemingly bychance, who has made the rest of his existenceincluding his fianceeseem draband lifeless. She returns his ardor and ups the ante: "God, she thought, howshe wanted him, and how unseemly and unspeakable were the ways in which shewanted him." Alas, it is not to be, for she is married to his uncle, and he hasa war that will take him away, and each will think the other is dead. And thosestretches are where the novel really comes alive, as they depict the brutalityinflicted by the Japanese on the POWs who must build the Thai-Burma railway(which gives the novel its title) and ultimately illuminate their differentvalues and their shared humanity.When the leads are offstage,the novel approaches greatness in its inquiry into what it means to be a good person. But there's too much "her body was a poem beyondmemorising" for the novel to fulfill its considerable ambition. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One of Australia's most celebrated authors, Flanagan has garnered multiple awards for his fiction (Wanting), nonfiction (And What Do You Do, Mr. Gable?), and directing (The Sound of One Hand Clapping). He has an uncanny ability to write literary prose with journalistic exactness set against cinematic landscapes. Taking its name from a collection of haiku poems by Matsuo Basho-, this novel is set at the end of World War II in a Japanese POW camp. Australian prisoners, led by physician Dorrigo Evans, are assigned the grueling task of building the Thai-Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway and famously depicted in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. (Flanagan's father had been a POW and worked on the railway.) Amid daily violence, disease, and death, both the prisoners and the guards search for a sense of normalcy as they remain duty-bound to hierarchy. As the war ends and soldiers return to civilian life, each struggles to find meaning outside the routines of imprisonment. Dorrigo, in particular, has trouble reconciling his status as hero with the unshakable trauma he's experienced. VERDICT Utilizing prose and poems, Flanagan articulates the silent experiences and fractured memories of war. Not so much for fans of historical fiction, this narrative will instead appeal to the deeply introspective reader. [See Prepub Alert, 2/3/14.]-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From bestselling Australian writer Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish) comes a supple meditation on memory, trauma, and empathy that is also a sublime war novel. Initially, it is related through the reminiscences of Dorrigo Evans, a 77-year-old surgeon raised in Tasmania whose life has been filtered through two catastrophic events: the illicit love affair he embarked on with Amy Mulvaney, his uncle's wife, as a young recruit in the Australian corps and his WWII capture by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. Most of the novel recounts Dorrigo's experience as a POW in the Burmese jungle on the "speedo," horrific work sessions on the "Death Railway" that leave most of his friends dead from dysentery, starvation, or violence. While Amy, with the rest of the world, believes him dead, Dorrigo's only respite comes from the friends he tries to keep healthy and sane, fellow sufferers such as Darky Gardiner, Lizard Brancussi, and Rooster MacNiece. Yet it is Dorrigo's Japanese adversary, Major Nakamura, Flanagan's most conflicted and fully realized character, whose view of the war-and struggles with the Emperor's will and his own postwar fate-comes to overshadow Dorrigo's story, especially in the novel's bracing second half. Pellucid, epic, and sincerely touching in its treatment of death, this is a powerful novel. 50,000-copy first printing. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.