Book Group meeting Monday 16 February: 2014 Man Booker prize winner

Introduced by Lawrence Youlten, Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Far North, was of particular interest to those members whose friends or relations had personally experienced the conditions under which the prisoners of war captured at the fall of Singapore had been used as slave labour to build the Burma Railway. Many did not survive the appalling conditions, and deaths among the native population forced to work alongside the PoWs were also very high. This is a theme that has been treated in several notable films (eg The Bridge on the River Kwai) and books, both fiction and non-fiction (The Railway Man). Flanagan's novel draws largely on the recollections of his schoolteacher father who was such a prisoner. In the novel, the protagonist is a doctor who has to try and cope with the deprivations, illnesses and injuries suffered by the other Australian prisoners. The story of this phase of his life is interwoven with his experiences before and after the war, and one criticism of the book was that the interweaving of the stories did not succeed convincingly. Others were not impressed by the attempts to draw parallels between poetry by Tennyson and the haikus liked by one of the brutal camp guards. Some doubt was expressed about the authenticity of the descriptions of appalling violence directed against the prisoners, but a timely obituary of a British PoW survivor, Henry McCreath, published in theTimes on 20 February, included details every bit as savage as those in the book. Some of our members had found the book unreadable, and others, as I did myself, had found it a moving and thought-provoking story. These disparate opinions were parallelled by the reviews in the literary press,  that ranged from the vituperative, (London Review of Books) to the adulatory.(New York Review of Books). Two members of the book group who had lived in Tasmania, (where Flanagan was brought up), were able to provide some interesting background to the author. Whatever we thought of it, the Man Booker judges gave it the thumbs-up.