![]() ![]() For Dorrigo - the name comes from a town in New South Wales - is a prisoner of war, among the more than 9,000 Australians who in 1943 slaved on what was called the “Death Railway.” A train line cut through the jungles of Burma and Thailand, that “Pharaonic project” killed nearly 100,000 of the Allied prisoners and impressed Asian laborers who were forced to build it. ![]() His narrow road is a railway, and he labors too under a different compulsion, one that takes the shape of the Japanese Army. well, that’s another question entirely.įlanagan’s Dorrigo Evans, a young medical officer, seems at first to travel a different path. Whether that journey has any meaning, whether there’s anything beyond putting one foot in front of the other. ![]() Basho walks because he must, and in reading him the old cliché comes alive: Life is a journey. Yet his walk was marked by moments of terrible loneliness, and he seemed to travel under a kind of compulsion, without a defined goal or purpose. Basho went north from present-day Tokyo through a mountainous land of often shattering beauty. ![]() The title of Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel comes from a 17th-century Japanese classic, a little book by the poet Basho that mixes a prose travel narrative with haiku in its account of a long journey on foot. ![]()
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