And this is all for today
Thank you very much everyone for your questions, and many thanks to Richard for answering as many as he could and as thoughtfully as he did. Cheers!
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Peopleneedplates asks:
Your title The Narrow Road to the Deep North is borrowed from the Japanese haiku writer Basho’s travelogue. How important is Japanese culture to you, and could you explain more about its role in the novel and in your work in general?
Guardian contributor I am no expert on Japanese literature, but I do have a great love of it. For the novel to escape judgement, I did seek to use the influences of Japanese poetry and fiction to shape the essence of a book. The structure, really, is that of Akutagawa's Rashomon; the language's economy informed by Japanese poetry. There is much else besides, but that's not the point.
The heart of it is this: if these poems and novels represent high points of Japanese culture, my father's experience represents one of its lowest points. And at some level, it mattered to me to reconcile the two, and it felt that only by reconciling them could I write this novel.
Richard Joseph, over on Twitter, asks:
Is your father still alive? What influence did his life have on the character of Dorrigo Evans? Great book, by the way!
Guardian contributor
jonCG asks:
Amazing book. Thank you. Is it wrong to see echoes of Patrick White in the writing?
Guardian contributor Many thanks, Jon. It is wrong, if flattering. I found my Tasmania in the pages of Kafka, Faulkner, Borges, Kundera, Hrabal, Cortazar, Chekhov, Tolstoy and many others. But in White—much as I admire him— I recognised nothing of my world. He was our sphinx in the desert, and I grew up in the rainforest.
"In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked"
Sandra Maria Luz asks:
Hello ... What is the main talent a writer should have ?
Guardian contributor Before I started writing I knew everything about it and could have answered you so much better. Now I have written a few books I realise I know nothing. But in all the writers I admire the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.
And I do mean detonator.
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TheBookAddictedGirl asks:
How close is this story to that of your own father and was it a painful journey for you and for him?
Guardian contributor In this solipsistic age, where we believe the public confessional will save our souls, we fail to appreciate that man survives by his ability to forget.
Yet, equally, freedom exists in the space of memory, and at a certain point we all need to advance back into that shadow in order to be liberated.
The stories of my father and this novel are utterly different and had to be. A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel. And yet I can see now that it sometimes falls to another to seek to communicate the incommunicable. I understood this book for some years as something I would have to write if i was ever to write anything else.
janerr asks:
Richard, The Narrow Road is a masterpiece, my favorite of all your books so far, for many reasons but initially for its setting in Cleveland. In Dorrigo Evans you have created an amazing characterisation; a three dimensional portrayal of human doubt and perceptions of weakness if that is not too moral a term, not to mention his depth of spiritual questioning. I have a slightly morbid question about your description of men withering away from starvation, their buttocks so diminished that their anuses became exposed. I’ve never come across quite such a graphic description but it feels terribly real in your story. Where did this image come from if you don’t mind me asking?
Guardian contributor We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things. The shocking detail of anuses thrusting out like turks head knots I came upon in a POW's diary. It tells you everything.
Kaye Melbourne asks:
Thank you for your wonderful books, and especially The Narrow Road to the Deep North. My dear dad was a survivor also as are his offspring. I have read widely and obsessively about the line and your book seemed to settle the obsession. I can’t really say why, but I think it is because of the humanity of the Japanese characters. So few writings have tried to make sense of the Japanese experience in more than simplistic terms. In the many conversations I had with dad about it I felt he would always be trying to understand so he too could forget and die in some sort of peace. I believe he did. His equanimity and quiet compassion remains my inspiration. I hope you have the strength to keep writing after such a powerful and careful piece. What next? Peace and love to you and your family.
Guardian contributor
khat_999 asks:
Firstly, congratulations on the book and making the short list for the Booker. The recognition has got to be satisfying. At times I found the book emotionally hard-going and my willingness to keep investing in the story was tested. I am curious to know whether you found writing it emotionally difficult and does writing such a story require a degree of disengagement?
Guardian contributor
Felix Ellis asks:
Richard, thanks for your wonderful book and the inspiration you give to everyone writing on this funny little island. You said when you were shortlisted that you were resigned to having a few too many pints shouted for you at the Hope & Anchor. Given that, when you win the Booker would you prefer Boags or Cascade?
Guardian contributor
"In Australia today strong voices are being raised saying some people are less than people. It is poison to the soul of a society"
bonobo123 asks:
Many thanks for all of the great writing. I very much enjoyed the Sound of One Hand Clapping and Death of a River Guide, also your essays. I am looking forward to reading this one.
I wanted to ask, given that your novels often have humanitarian themes that hark back to older Australian values related to kindness, helping our neighbours and fairness (aka “mateship”, “a fair go” etc), what do you think about where Australia is currently heading socially and politically? Have we lost these values, or are they still very much a part of our psyche, in your opinion?
Guardian contributor The horror of the Death Railway doesn't begin with the first beating, or the first execution. It begins decades earlier when the idea is put abroad in society by politicians, public figures, writers, and journalists that some people are less than people. And in Australia today strong voices of the powerful are being raised, saying some people are less than people. It is poison to the soul of a society, and it should be named as such, and its evils opposed and ended.
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C1aireA asks:
You’ve said that The Narrow Road to the Deep North took you 12 years to write. Could you explain how it developed over that very long period. You’ve published two other novels in that time. Were you writing them simultaneously and how did that work?
Guardian contributor I wrote it as five different novels, each of which I then deleted from my laptop and the hard copies of which I burnt. They were rubbish. In between I wrote my other novels. A good writer needs a good rubbish bin. My one strength as a writer is an awareness of how mediocre most of what I write is. Perhaps a good writer is a bad writer who is a better rewriter.
HannahJP asks:
Hi Richard. You collaborated with Baz Luhrmann on the script for the film Australia. How different is writing a film script to writing a novel? And what was that collaborative process like? Were there many challenges? Is it something you would like to do again, and if so, why?
Guardian contributor Working with Baz was like running off with the circus for a year. I enjoyed it but then I was ready to return to my day job. I am not sure if Scott Fitzgerald feels similarly.
Would I do it again?
Film is a tyranny, and the tyrant is money. Though flawed, often failing, and mostly broke, books remain the republic of letters. And all up I think I'd rather live in a republic, no matter how gimcrack, than in a tyranny.
"A joke is perhaps the final and most beautiful affirmation of what it is to be fully human"
mambono5 asks:
Narrow Road to the Deep North is so heartbreaking – the romance, the camps and an ageing veteran. Gould’s Book of Fish was similarly horrific (wonderful), but I felt it had a broader humour. There is still some humour in Narrow Road, but did you steer from being too comic because of the personal nature of the story? And how do you approach incorporating humour in to terrible situations in your writing?
Guardian contributor Gould's is a tragicomedy, so it could be funnier. Narrow Road didn't allow me the same latitude, and a writer must always serve their story. But the humour is still important. It is the last defence of humanity when it has had everything else stolen from it. Human beings do not capitulate to horror readily or easily. A joke is perhaps the final and most beautiful affirmation of what it is to be fully human. To not have jokes and humour throughout either novel would have been utterly untrue to what we know of ourselves.
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TomRegan asks:
Besides your obvious concern for verisimilitude, especially in your rendering of life and death in the Burmese work camp – and, by extension the truth of your father’s experience – I’m wondering how much you were also concerned with the fictional conventions or generic elements of a story like this, which is also a kind of historical romance, right? Raw and real as it often is, it also belongs in a literary tradition of stories about love and loss during wartime, doesn’t it?
Guardian contributor In speaking to the deep truths of love, I think love stories do tend to return to certain conventions. We understand love as a truth that opens us up to something beyond ourselves in a moment that dies immediately after. And that is why love stories so often are also stories of death. War is the story of death par excellence, and so war illuminates love.
Steff Clarke asks:
Richard, why do dogs walk around in circles before lying down?
Guardian contributor Because they're trying to answer questions like this. And failing.
John Macleay asks:
Has the book been published in Japan yet? If so, has there been any reaction? If not, when do you intend to publish there? What are the barriers/difficulties of publishing a book of this nature in Japan, if there is an intention to publish there. PS: Loved the book. Plus have read Gould’s Book of Fish and Sound of One Hand Clapping.
Guardian contributor Many thanks, John. No date is yet set for Japan but it is to published there, as my other books have been. My Japanese translator was a great help in the final stages of writing the book, and she feels it will meet with a good reaction when published. I hope so, as I met with much generosity and kindness when I went to Japan to meet with ex POW guards. I think the Japanese people are perhaps more open to hearing about these things than they are given credit for in the west.
Richard is with us now
Thanks for all your questions. Let’s kick this off:
Guardian contributor Hello, everyone. Many thanks for all your questions. I'll have a read and start answering soon.
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells one of the less familiar stories of the second world war: the building of the Burma railway by Australian prisoners-of-war, who died in their thousands in the service of an engineering feat that became a test of national character for the Japanese, after being judged impossible by earlier European colonists.
Flanagan, a Tasmanian whose father worked on the infamous “death railway”, spent 12 years working on this sixth novel, as he told interviewer Michael Williams.
The infamous historical episode is refracted through the experiences of surgeon Dorrigo Evans and camp commander Nakamura, whom we follow through the war and into old age. The fractured narrative forces the realities of each phase of their lives into confrontation with the others.
The result, according to Thomas Keneally, is “a grand examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh and, above all, of how hard it is to live after survival”.
Flanagan, who first sprang to international prominence with his love-it-or-hate-it postmodern bouillabaisse of a novel Goulds Book of Fish back in 2002, will join us for a webchat on Friday October 10 at 1pm BST. Post your questions in the comments below and then follow the discussion as it happens live.
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I'm being told I have to go to another interview, so I'm afraid I have to leave it there. Many thanks for all your questions, and my apologies to all those whose questions I simply didn't have time to answer.