September 2019 book review part 1

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, by Richard Flanagan
A young Australian man does well at school, qualifies as a doctor and is about to carve a successful career for himself when two things happen: first he falls in love with a married woman, then, war breaks out and he is called up to serve in the Far East. Taking a lot of emotional baggage with him, he soon finds plenty of things to distract him, most notably that he is almost immediately taken prisoner by the Japanese, who regard P.O.Ws as cowards and therefore not worthy of any of the human rights guaranteed them by the Geneva Convention. As senior officer as well as the only doctor, he has to stand by as his men fall prey to beri-beri, pellagra, cholera and, worst of all, the cynical and extreme cruelty of their captors.

Finally he is released at the end of the war, irretrievably scarred by his experiences, he resumes his medical career, but there is always something missing in his life. Like love, for example...

This book is stunning. Full of beauty as well as horror, I found it quite the most powerful piece of writing I have encountered in some years. The reader is completely immersed in the lives of the characters, feels the heat and humidity of the jungle, suffers with the prisoners through their terrible ordeal. Carries my highest recommendation.

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, AND OTHER TRAVEL PIECES, by Matsuo Basho
Basho was a poet who lived in Japan in the latter part of the 17th century, and is now regarded as the greatest exponent of Haiku, the 3 line, 17 syllable format by which poets express some special insight about the natural world, and sometimes themselves. And this story, which mixes prose with haiku, takes us on a journey the poet took to visit important Buddhist shrines, other poets and ascetics, like himself, and generally undertake a journey of the mind and spirit as much as the body.

It’s a very human story. On one occasion, for instance, he takes a long detour to see the full moon rise over a Buddhist temple, only for it to remain cloudy all night, thus denying him the experience he has dreamed of for so long. Or when he returns from one trip, and writes:

Shed of everything else,
I still have some lice
I picked up on the road-
Crawling on my summer robes.

Note this does not conform to the format I mentioned above. The translator, Nobyuki Yuasa, has made a decision that in order to bring the full character and beauty of Basho’s haikus to life in English, he needs to use this format of his own design. But it’s not “wrong” to do this. The Japanese poets themselves used a variety of different formats when it suited them. Finally, I cannot resist quoting one more haiku for you, this one being regarded as possibly the ultimate flowering of his skill:

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water -
A deep resonance.

Obviously Flanagan borrowed the title of his book from Basho, and I believe we are meant to take from this the fact that the protagonist of the novel is himself on a spiritual journey of his own- which in a way, he is. But what I found as I read Basho’s account of his travels, his gentleness, his love of beauty and peace, his supreme insight into the human condition that all the greatest poets have, that fast forward three centuries, his own countrymen, no different in essence from Basho himself, would be committing some of the grossest atrocities against their fellow human beings the world has ever seen.