Richard Flanagan war novel provides answer to ‘book of the year’ question

Australian writer Richard Flanagan.

FOR book reviewers, October is the cruellest month, when our inboxes breed emails from editors throughout the land, asking the toughest question of all: what was your book of the year (150 words please — by December 1)?

The past 12 months would provoke option paralysis in any reader of Ozlit. Should we ennoble once again our bard from the west, Tim Winton? Or has that slow, sweet purveyor of fiction Joan London pipped him? How can we ignore the eloquent fury of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book? Perhaps only by recognising the 50 years of sterling literary service given by Tom Keneally. And Elizabeth Harrower, whose final novel, a family drama that tastes like Jane Austen yet seethes beneath a Sydney sun — how can we ever recognise her contribution to Australian Letters?

And yet. Beyond Rohan Wilson and Peter Carey, beyond Christos Tsiolkas and Gerald Murnane, beyond Sonya Hartnett and Luke Carman and Ceridwen Dovey stands one title, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan, which, as if to help save us from further perplexity in deciding, has just been awarded the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Narrow Road was a novel I managed to be hilariously wrong about. My review began with the claim it would win this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award (it did not). But the impulse to celebrate the work was not misplaced. Many other readers have entered the hell Flanagan describes and emerged with a renewed sense of what war literature, at its best, can do: take false patriotism and cheap martial posturing and flay it to the bone, via an unblinking recognition of the reality of conflict.

INTERACTIVE: Booker by the numbers

Yet it is not the depiction of horror that makes The Narrow Road to the Deep North such a tremendous book, richly deserving of its prize. It is the sympathy that its creator is willing to extend, even to those who act monstrously. This is not to suggest that Flanagan offers exoneration; instead he offers understanding, an extension of curiosity that moves beyond his generation and his culture.

It is only this curiosity that allows us to see the Other in the full regalia of human specificity. And it is only by seeing the Other truly that the Australian prisoners in Flanagan’s novel can become more than empty propaganda for our presumed martial virtues as a nation.

The Tasmanian’s willingness to investigate the private ignominy of Major Nakamura’s peacetime survival (he was the former head of the camp in which the Australian soldiers rotted) allows us to see Dorrigo Evans (surgeon and chief officer of the Aussies) as a hero, despite his survivor guilt, despite his manifest flaws.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic