It is unusual for me to start writing about
a book before I have finished it but this book has evoked strong responses in
me that have varied enormously.
The book follows an Australian surgeon,
Dorrigo Evans, who joins the Australian army at the start of the war and is
captured by the Japanese, ending up working on the Burma railway construction.
Just before leaving for the war he has a short affair with his uncle's young
wife, that has an impact on the rest of his life.
The book ranges back and forwards from the
war years to the current day, following the fortunes of both Dorrigo and his
fellow prisoners and their captors.
The writing is intense and at times almost
poetic with short arresting sentences. At other times any beauty in the
language gets overwhelmed by the sheer barbarity of what is being described. It
is at this point I have to question whether this is gratuitous gore or
something that is necessarily shocking to make us confront man's inhumanity. I
don't know. It is certainly not an easy read and has left no options for a
happy or hopeful ending.
With the last world war so far away for
many of us, it is important that we do not forget the realities of it and the
huge waste of humanity that results but is fiction the way to do this, or is it
just another form of forgetting? I don't know. I will revisit my musings on
this when I finish the book.
So I have finished and I have to say that I
found the end of the book a little indulgent. Did we need a chapter on the
execution by hanging of a Korean guard-especially one ending in a very clichéd mid
–sentence halt as the trapdoor opened. Did the book really need our central
character saving his family from the middle of an inferno in a forest fire? It
was more Rambo than anything else.
The book has made the Booker shortlist but
I would be disappointed if it were to win. 7/10
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