The way historical fiction works is by using some basic recognizable details to situate the reader in a time and place (the historical part), and then to imagine the rest, in order to make a narrative (the fiction part). Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a fictional account of a historical event — the experiences of Australian soldiers in a Japanese prisoner of war camp on the Thai Burma Death Railway, also known as The Line, in 1943. A plan by the Imperial Japanese Army to speedily construct a railway between Bangkok and Burma, they used, among others, tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war. One of them was Arch Flanagan, the father of Richard, to whom The Narrow Road to the Deep North is dedicated: “prisoner san byaku san ju go (335).” The prisoners were starved and abused, thousands died.
The imagined details of this book: Dorrigo Evans is a doctor and a colonel of the Australian soldiers in the camp. He is handsome, intelligent, a natural leader, irresistible to every person around him, even his captors. All of his weaknesses come from how good he is, how virtuous: “The more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.” In the camp, the Australian soldiers die off as they are beaten and starved to death by the rank of brutally efficient Japanese commanders, who themselves have been driven mad by the conditions under which they live. The Japanese see the Australians as useless — oversized, stupid, and lazy — and are annoyed by their constant singing and joking. The Australians see the Japanese as slave drivers, demented by their devotion to the abstraction that is the Emperor. Both believe that the other is morally corrupt in some way. In the vacuum that follows the end of the war, however, all moral reasoning that made sense at the time becomes unfamiliar. The war ends, and everyone who survives tries to fold themselves into the compromise of normal life. There is an epigraph is from Paul Celan, which speaks of the horror of returning to life after deep, specific suffering — “Mother, they write poems.”
Outside of the camp, the most important story is Dorrigo’s love affair before the war, with his uncle’s wife Amy, which took place in a hotel pub in Adelaide. The love affair is stopped by the war, but its memory and the sadness of its failed connection stays around, forming a Shakespearean subplot. The primary subject of this book is human suffering, and all the endlessly interesting ways in which people cause themselves and others to suffer. The strange euphemism “Prisoner of War” eventually comes to describe every character in the book.
The title comes from the travel journal of Basho, the Edo poet. Basho took a long solitary journey north, questioning, in his journal, whether life has any meaning at all. The question of meaning, and whether or not it can be extracted through the study of history, has preoccupied writers of historical fiction over the past fifty years. Authors such as Peter Carey, Laurent Binet, Salman Rushdie, and E.L. Doctorow, have felt the need to meta-theorize or “postmodernize” the re-creation of the past, to question the writing of history and the usefulness of fiction even as they do it. They are preoccupied by the need to tell the difference between the real (unattainable), the true (mostly nonexistent), and the told (unreliable). The conclusion, insofar as there is one, is that meaning and memory are slippery surfaces across which we can only slide.
Part of the problem of meaning, for what might be called the postmodern or “meta” writers of history and historical fiction, is plausibility. That is, the reader being able to believe what they are reading is “true,” (true, in this sense, meaning that it really happened). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the French historian who founded the movement of “New History,” began in the 1970s to write history using the first person “I” pronoun, as a way of moving history from story to discourse, and signaling to his readers that they would never read history that hadn’t been written by a human, and therefore wasn’t subject to being falsified by a human imagination. Data are unable to speak for themselves, intervention is needed. History becomes fiction, in this view, because it is narrative. Flanagan presents an opposite pole to this view. This book is historical in every sense; it could almost have been written at the time of its setting, in the 1940s, before the parsing of the horror of the Second World War caused us to reorient our worldview in almost every sphere of life, and to question the very possibility of meaning.
In historical fiction, the world has in some ways already been invented, and the task of the author is to describe it, that is, to fictionalize it. According to E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” Writers of historical fiction change story to plot, using description.
The difference between history and fiction, Sir Philip Sidney argued, in his A Defense of Poetry (c.1579), is not what did happen, but what could. It was a rebuttal to those who were suspicious of the power of fiction, from Plato to the Puritans:
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature.
The imagination required to write fiction, in Sidney’s line of argument, is not gnosis but praxis, and becomes an empathetic force, a virtue. Fiction is “true” not in a historical sense, but in a moral one, exactly because of its inventive power. Fiction, unlike history or philosophy, can create a world that didn’t previously exist, out of the one that does.
Description is where the story is, and also where the postmodern complaint with the story is. It’s where the poetry of the writing is. Those writers of literary historical fiction over the past forty or fifty years who have become fed up with traditional, novelistic historical storytelling have often revived the Platonic quarrel with poetry, in questioning of the usefulness of that leap to fiction. Description, though, is what Flanagan revels in. He is a storyteller in the mythic sense, of lives determined by emotion, error, and turns of coincidence and fate. This book goes from one end of a life to other, with an epic journey and a romantic tragedy in the middle (there are many references to Ulysses; Dorrigo’s life continually marked with poetry). The plot is driven by suffering and desire. Destiny of the characters is the number and nature of words spoken (One of Dorrigo Evans’s tasks is to choose which soldiers get sent on the march and which stay behind, essentially, which ones will stay alive and which won’t, an echo of the Judenräte).
Haiku poetry, the great poetic forms of restraint, is interspersed throughout the chapters, highlighting the overflowing quality of Flanagan’s sentences. His sentences are poetic, even if they lack the precision and control of the poetry that intersects the chapters:
A drop dripped.
Tiny, whispered Darky Gardiner.
The noise of the monsoonal rain flogging the canvas roof of the long, A-framed shelter — bamboo-strutted and open-walled — meant Darky Gardiner could hardly hear himself. The clamor of the rain made such nights only more desolate, worse, in a way, than the days when he was just trying to survive but at least had company to do it with. The jungle shuddering in sheets of noise, the incessant drumming of mud churning as the rain slammed into it, the strange slaps and punches of invisible water runs, all of it he found dismal.
Another drop dripped.
There is an amputation scene that the squeamish will have to divide up and read in shifts, taking breaks in between to hold the open book aside, turn their faces away and gasp for air. It’s all part of the stinking sensuality of Flanagan’s writing. It isn’t enough to be told the story. We sit through it, like a cinema for smell and touch.
His language is ornate:
Dorrigo would sway back and forth and imagine himself shaping into one of the boughs of the wildly snaking peppermint gums that fingered and flew through the great blue sky overhead…he would drink in the birdsong of the wrens and the honeyeaters, the whip-crack call of the jo-wittys, punctuated by Gracie’s steady clop, and the creak and clink of the cart’s leather traces and wood shafts and iron chains, a universe of sensation that returned in dreams.
His dialogue can be dramatic, almost to the point of seeming parodic:
She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans?
She rolled the cigarette end around in the ashtray.
Do you?
Yet even when his writing cloys, it still feels sincere, in its faith in the redemptive power of art after tragedy.
Flanagan seems to be at heart a novelist, without interest in questioning the utility of historical fiction, only in using it to create fiction; using one experience to make another. In history, other than narrative, all we have are statistics, and the leap required to get from statistics to history is one of imagination. That leap is where Flanagan lives, as a writer. Belief, as Flanagan shows us, comes not just from accuracy, but from the power of the writing itself. “A poem is not a law, Sir” a soldier tells Dorrigo, known in the camp as Big Fella. “But he realized with a shock it more or less was.” In Flanagan’s books, story becomes true by being poetry. The truth in this book is not that of the historical sense, but in a Keatsian, moral sense. We don’t read historical novels like War and Peace to find out about the French influence in Russia, but for the very pleasure of exercising the imagination — for their virtue.
There is an endearing overabundance of almost everything in this book, which in its enthusiasm, becomes part of the pleasure, though some faith is needed to get through some of the love scenes, and to travel along with the humorless, masculine sentimentality of the hero. Readers of this book should do away with all suspicions, and get ready for an avalanche of feeling and sincerity, or else risk living in the sad restraint of Flanagan’s characters.
The more I learn about World War II, the more it fascinates me. I feel like most people have a vague, middle-ground understanding of the war. Two generations removed from the war, I have trouble fathoming both the global scale of the conflict and the impact it had on hundreds of millions of individuals. I had a child’s school-taught understanding of the war until I read a novel, actually. The second part of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement tells of the British evacuation from France at Dunkirk after the Germans overran the country. It was an important event in the war, but one that I had never really learned much about, and McEwan’s rich storytelling made me want to learn more. I also realized that I ought to know more about the war that both of my grandfathers fought in, one in Europe and one in the Pacific.
Hi,
I have three recommendations. They cover different sides of the war and require no special knowledge of the military in order to enjoy them. They are wonderfully written.
The first is a novel, the Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's about a crew of an anti-submarine corvette in the North Atlantic. I like it because you see how wearing it was. The crew gets on board in 1939 and those that live get off in 1945. The drudgery and terror are nicely described.
Eric Bergerud's Touched With Fire is great. It concerns the land war in New Guinea and the Solomons. The fighting differed from Europe in a number of ways. For one it is tropical, making the fight somewhat similar to Vietnam. For another the two sides were more closely matched in air and sea power which forced the US to fight differently. It's an excellent read.
Antony Beevor's Fall of Berlin 1945 is great, but is also terribly depressing. The end of the catastrophic Russo-German conflict is described in all its brutal horror.
Tripp
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres is the story of a Greek island that comes under the control of the Italians and then the Germans in WWII. It's a fantastic read and one of those relatively untold stories of the war you were mentioning above. I highly recommend it.
I second anonymous' recommendation of Corelli. Just a great book.
A few nonfiction choices. In my opinion, Beevor's "Stalingrad" is the better of his two books on the war. Stalingrad was the true turning point in the European war (although you will see many smart folks argue that the turning point was Pearl Harbor, the Russian Front broke the Wehrmacht and Stalingrad, with Kursk following, was the breaking point). The scale of the battle is just amazing. I loved Atkinson's book, but reading about Stalingrad makes you wonder whether we could have won a battle like that and thankful we did not have to find out. Richard Overy wrote a very good overview of the Russian Front as well, in "Russia's War". William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" sets the standard and rightly so. For a thousand page tome it is incredibly readable and never less than fascinating. John Lukacs wrote a great book about the period immediately following Dunkirk, when any sane nation would have sued for peace and the British decided to fight on alone ("Five Days in May").
Oddly, or perhaps not, there is a lot of good detective fiction set in Europe immediately prior to and during the war. Robert Janes and Alan Furst are both good, as is Eric Ambler (the latter two are probably better described as spy novelists). If you get nothing else from this long entry (apologies), put this one in the queue: Philip Kerr wrote three detective novels that have been anthologized under the title "Berlin Noir". They are set in Berlin in 1933, 1938 or so (just prior to Kristallnacht) and in post-war Berlin around 1946. Spectacular – Kerr hasn't written anything close to this good since, but these are just fantastic. The changes in German society over the course of the three books are worth the price of admission by themselves, and the stories are quite good.
Wow. Great suggestions. I'd love to hear more if anyone else has ideas.
I second the Beevor recommendations. Both are excellent.
For a more personal look at the war, I recommend Studs Terkel's oral history of the war: The Good War. I'm a sucker for almost any Terkel book, but this one stands out even that body of excellent works.
Great post. A guy like me doesn't find many readers interested in the warrior condition much these days. I recomend Flag of Our Fathers by James Bradley. Clint Eastwood is working on making it into a movie. I could make recommendations all day long, but I think you have a good start with the books already suggested.
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich-Shier
Patton-Ladilas Farago
Macarther-Manchester
In Harms Way-Stanton
Citizen Soldiers – Ambrose
http://www.historynet.com/wwii/reviews/
The war produced a lot of good fiction. I’d say all the famous books are still worth reading: The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22, even A Bell for Adano and Tales of the South Pacific. A couple others I remember liking are Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens and A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown. For contemporary non-fiction you won’t do much better than Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles.
I'm just a few chapters into Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. His The Great War and Modern Memory is one of the best WWI books I've ever read, and so far in Wartime he is proving just as insightful on WWII. He served in WWII himself as an infantry officer and that firsthand experience adds another layer to the analysis.
"Articles of War" by Nick Arvin–this new novel was inspired by Arvin's grandfather's service in WWll. I've heard it compared to Red Badge of Courage. There was lobbying here to have it as the "one book" selection for in our city–it may be set in WWll but it's certainly timely today.
See you at the party! Wendi
The Beevor book on the Battle of Stalingrad is indeed good, but here's a couple of other suggestions on the eastern front, a side of the war which Americans tend to not know much about. Years ago I read a book by a German war correspondent: it's just called Stalingrad by Heinz Schroter. It's doubtless out of print and it's journalism more than history and only from the German side. But still, it's worth reading. The author was at the battle and the horrific stories and sheer immediacy conveyed by the book gives you a real sense of what it was like to endure this military disaster from the German side. I recently also read Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army by Vasily Grossman. Grossman was a Russian writer who worked as a war correspondent; most of the book is excerpts from his journals and reporting. Again, there's some vivid writing about the unbelievably horrible eastern front, and the entire book gives you a sense of the mixture of idealism and brutality which characterized the Soviet side of that monumental conflict.
I keep coming back to this thread to note down the various recommendations that are being posted. Chatten's recommendation re: German perspectives and the Eastern front reminded me of a couple more books that I wanted to mention. One of the best books that I read last year was Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS. It's an extraordinarily powerful memoir that has to do more with the aftermath in Germany than with the war itself. I posted a mini-review of it on my blog in connection with my top ten reads from last year here. Another excellent book which covers similar territory in fiction is Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader. It's been a while since I read that one but I remember finding it deeply disturbing and very thought provoking.
"The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer (Engrossing memoirs written by a German soldier); Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler is excellent — though there are other good ones, his is bifurcated and the second volume deals with the 1936-1945 time period, which fits your bill nicely; "A World at Arms" by Weinberg (massive and slow-going, but comprehensive); "Ordinary Men" by Browning (the banality of evil — a look at the killing squads that moved through Poland in the wake of the fighting); I agree with previous posters that Beevor's books are worth your time, and also that "Fall of Berlin" is incredibly bleak; don't waste your time with "The Rise and Fall" by Shirer — it was poor history by the time it was published; also suggest you steer clear of Ambrose. One final suggestion: "The Book Thief" by Zusak (marketed as teen-lit, but a well-written).
I don't know if you're still checking this, it's been a while since anyone posted but the book that got me started reading WWII stuff, that also does a great job of conveying the emotion tied to the war is "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides. It focuses on one event in the war, in the Pacific, but is a great read, also very well researched. I'll also differ from the previous poster and suggest reading at least the first third of Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It was very helpful in understanding how it all came about, although it is very dry and you have to be really interested to get through it.