Ambiguity in response to a novel rests with judgments that test values - literary, stylistic and ethical. I read Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning Narrow Road to the Deep North ready to turn away from the page at the shock of his recreation of a WWII Japanese work camp in Burma; but I could not deny the power of the writing. The novel might cover the same territory as the Bridge on the River Kwai, but Flanagan’s account makes tactile the foul degradation and suffering. His characterization takes us into the minds of the Australian prisoners and their Japanese captors, in particular that of the officer Doctor Dorrigo Evans, the Aussie chief, and his counterpart, Captain Nakamura. On the one hand, the novel offers us the mentality of the Captain who can justify working men to death even as he demands they be beaten to insure their compliance; and on the other hand, the mentality of his opponent who encounters such treatment and yet does not collapse, rather finds the strength to accept cruelty, resist with caution, and remain generous. Such focus has little by way of sentimentality. The extremity of the situation is evoked in measured, unadorned prose. Flanagan gives us two men who reveal themselves in acts of self-justification. Each asks: am I a good man? Their answers lay out a moral spread that stretches from assurance to distrust. If a claim can be made for the novel’s stature, it is in its willingness to entertain such moral contrasts. This is fiction that takes us into dark places.

The style of the prison camp sections mimics, in some sense, the effects of extreme suffering. The men are commanded to watch the beating of a fellow prisoner wrongly accused of dereliction – Darky Gardiner is incapable of standing, let alone working, because of his physical weakness and illness. Nevertheless, he must be punished:

So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know. At times, though, the prisoners were tricked back into seeing the beating by some novelty, such as a small teak log that the Goanna [the guard] found and threw at Darky Gardiner’s head, or when he thrashed Darky Gardiner’s body with a bamboo pole as thick as his arm, as if the prisoner were a particularly filthy carpet. Blow after blow – on the monster’s face, a monster’s mask.

The prisoners were starving, and increasingly their thoughts were on their evening meal, which, however meagre it was, was still real and still waiting for them; the beating was denying them the pleasure of eating it.

The numbed passivity, the slowness of their thoughts, and the distraction caused by by their own state in extremis, and their inability to feel shock or sympathy, limp along in the monosyllables and are echoed in the sickening details of the log and the pole. Then there is the metaphor of the filthy carpet – Darky was indeed covered in filth and filthied himself in the course of the beating. We have a shift in reference: who sees Darky as a monster? The guard? Or is it the narrator’s judgment, imposed on the reader? Finally the demands of survival: hunger over any other concern, narrows all consciousness to bodily demands.  This passage is carefully composed and sets itself off for attention. We have analysis and judgment, and a form of estranged compassion. How can the prisoners not respond to the torture of on of their own, and yet how can they? And the victim? How is he not made monstrous, and yet be thoroughly human. 

Given the imprimatur of the Man Booker Prize committee and very favorable reviews, it is difficult to evaluate a novel that treats of such topics as less than a success. Admittedly, as I finished the book, I had some questions about the various plot resolutions, the depiction of the later career of Dorrigo and his chief opponent, and I wondered also about a love story involving Evans and his uncle’s wife – an affair idealized, consuming and yet displaced; no resolution but only frustration. There is an improbable latter day rescue a from Tasmanian bush fire, and there are glancing references to the salvific nature of poetry, both Japanese and English. Yet the weight of the book seemed to tip the scales.

But then I read a corrosive review by Michael Hoffman, critic, academic, poet and translator, that compared the novel’s effect to that of a sham piece of masonry, decorated polystyrene, being dropped on a boat full of tourists from a bridge above. The boaters leap from their craft to escape destruction only to see the “weight” float deridingly away. They reach the shore thoroughly distressed and made uncomfortable – for nothing. Clearly, for Hoffman, Flanagan’s masterwork is all show, lacks gravity and frightens without substance. How can such a review do anything but evoke ambiguity in response to Narrow Road to the Deep North?

Granting that Hofmann’s objections have merit, his judgments, based upon passages he prints and dismisses as  bad writing, are not self-evidently so. Indeed, others have objected that the very passages he cites prove the opposite of his dismissive evaluation. Was the book really such a superficial deception?

In the end, I have to welcome the controversy, if controversy it is. The sharp disagreement has to focus on the act of judgment. We read within a context of expectation. The book is the finalist in a prestigious competition. So many experienced writers and critics have chosen this book among a host of others. Yet the contrarian voice has a salutary effect in demanding a rereading. Do I really admire the passages that I marked as memorable [as above]? Why? Do the mature reflections by the chief character on his life’s judgments carry the weight of responsibility and clarity of purpose? Is he a self-deprecating secular saint? (I am thinking of Graham Greene’s Scobie.) or does Flanagan give us a light-weight moral confection?

I certainly have thought and rethought my reactions to the novel in ways that heighten for me the good of differing critical voices. Poetry or literature in general may never make things happen, but the worlds literature evokes push us to understand own sense of value and demand honesty from writer and reader alike.