Tasmanian Richard Flanagan has won this year's Man Booker Prize for his majestic sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
It is an intensely satisfying triumph for the gifted 53-year-old as well as for literature and the art of storytelling; for readers who have been presented with a serious winner worthy of their attention and for a judging panel who, despite the various omissions along the way, ultimately chose probably the finest novel in English this year.
Sometimes it only takes a sentence, particularly if it happens to be uttered by another Australian winner of one of the most famous literary prizes.
Peter Carey has twice won the Booker prize, in the era before the Man sponsorship began. When asked recently who he was supporting this time, he smiled and said Richard Flanagan, adding: “He’s a serious guy, who can really, really write.” Carey said it all and the judges obviously agreed.
Whatever about the shortcomings of the longlist and the plight of literary fiction in a commercial marketplace, Flanagan’s win has brought honour to all involved and celebrates fiction.
Survivors of war
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a powerful, traditional, often brutal love story, determined by cold reality, history and the stories that haunt the survivors of war and their descendants.
It is about truth, the many faces of courage and the humanity of war, as well as its evil. It is also a truly great book, a classic in its vision and profundity. It will endure.
There are echoes of David Malouf's The Great World (1990) and an even more emphatic sense of Patrick White's towering influence in Flanagan's elegant prose, sardonic tone and astute observation throughout a narrative that centres on the remote, secretive Dorrigo Evans.
He is an ordinary individual, not a hero but an aloof, flawed, shadowy man both graced and damned by chance. He inhabits the margins. He has his reasons; an illicit and melodramatic passion for his uncle’s much younger wife.
Evans appears to have been marked by fate. As a small boy playing in the schoolyard he had caught a ball intended for the bigger players and somehow realised then, at the moment he reached into the sun, that he was special.
Real-life character
Partly based on a real-life character, the Australian surgeon Edward “Weary” Dunlop (1907–1993), Evans is the first of his family to get an education. He becomes a doctor and is successful with women.
Life, it seems, is easy for him. Fate intervenes. He meets Ella, a girl intent on marriage. She proves a remarkable creation. Domesticity is balanced with some extraordinarily vivid descriptions of war and the suffering that grinds down the jaunty Aussie troops whose good-natured behaviour bewilders the Japanese.
Evans witnesses living hell and relentless death, yet is destined to again experience chance at its most malicious.
Flanagan’s father, Archie, who died at 98 on the day the novel was finished, had been a prisoner of war labouring in horrific conditions during 1942 and 1943 on the notorious Death Railway, a 415km stretch between Burma and Thailand.
Flanagan’s novel is dedicated to him as is, no doubt, last night’s win.
