![]() ![]() He openly forgave the cold-blooded and tyrannical Japanese who tortured and murdered the men on the Burma-Thailand railway. ![]() After the war, Dunlop returned to an illustrious career in Australia. Dunlop, who looked after his men as they struggled under the most heinous conditions to clear jungle, break rock and lay rail from Bangkok to Rangoon, present-day Yangon, called his comrades “living skeletons.” As his men lay dying of malaria, beri-beri and cholera, he bartered with and cajoled the Japanese captors, some of them sadists who took the greatest pleasure in tormenting, torturing and beheading captives. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo. The novel revolves around the life of physician Dorrigo Evans, a character modeled after war hero Edward “Weary” Dunlop. Moving deftly from a Japanese POW camp to contemporary Australia, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of love, death, and family, exploring the many forms of good and evil, war and truth, guilt and transcendence. ![]() Richard Flanagan’s father was one of the lucky POWs who survived. Nearly 3,000 Australians were among those killed. Of those who perished, 90 percent were Asian, primarily Burmese and Malayans, but also Chinese, Tamils, Thais and Javanese. One in three prisoners’ lives was lost on that arch-brutal forced march. Yet there is only one stark, unrelenting and everlasting present - “the Line,” the 415-km-long Burma-Thailand railway that was built between June 1942 and October 1943 by more than 300,000 prisoners of war under the command of the Japanese. The time line of Richard Flanagan’s new novel, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” slips back and forth from prewar Tasmania, Melbourne and Adelaide to postwar Sydney, among other locations. ![]()
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