Novelist tells horrors of WWII POWs in Burma
Richard Flanagan, author of a new acclaimed World War II novel, grew up in an ancient rain forest on Tasmania, an island 200 miles south of Australia.
“It took me many years to understand how different it was. I grew up where the natural world was omnipresent. I would go to prospecting sites and abandoned mining towns with rain forests growing up around them,” he said during a telephone interview from a hotel in Sydney.
Mr. Flanagan, 53, studied history at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and has written six novels. His most recent, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, one of the world’s richest literary awards at 50,000 pounds (about $75,000).
The author, who spent 12 years writing the book, speaks at 7 p.m Wednesday in the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall, Oakland, a special event presented by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.
Inspiration for “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” came from
his father, Archie, who died in 2013 shortly after learning that his son had finished the novel. The elder Mr. Flanagan had often told his six children about his experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II. The Japanese forced their prisoners to do slave labor in the jungle on the Thai Burmese Railway in 1943.
Nearly 250,000 soldiers died of disease or starvation during the railroad’s construction. Japanese officers also subjected POWs to severe beatings. Archie Flanagan was among the 1,000 Australian prisoners led by Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, a doctor and national war hero.
The author once had a drink with Sir Dunlop, who told him that doctors took leadership roles among the captives.
“They instituted this communal system. The [military] officers still got some pay from the Japanese. The officers had to pay money into a general fund to buy food and drugs off the black market. The officers had to work as orderlies in hospitals. It was a world where the strong and the fortunate were expected to shield and to protect the weakest,” Mr. Flanagan said.
Before his novel received the Man Booker Prize, Mr. Flanagan considered going to a remote area of northwest Australia to work 12- hour shifts in the mines so he could support his wife and three daughters. He said he would have taken “whatever job a middle-aged fool could get there.”
“To be a writer is a journey into humility. There’s not much money in it. I don’t teach. I’ve always written. My luck had run out. Life’s a great comedian. In your system, writers tend to work in universities. In our system, you have to sell books. I think that’s a good thing. You first and foremost have to think of the reader. That’s your primary responsibility.”
A few months ago, Mr. Flanagan returned to his boyhood home in Rosebery, a mountain town on Tasmania. He was accompanied by a BBC film crew that is making a documentary about him.
“I’ve got a very strong memory of where I grew up,” the author said, adding that his family’s former home still stands and is occupied, but he had trouble finding it at first because the rain forest is nearly overtaking it.
His experiences during earlier book tours in America have been amusing and, occasionally, disconcerting.
“I was introduced as a French poet once in Portland, Ore., because they couldn’t understand my accent. It was very unseemly. As a writer, you survive by misunderstandings. You’re just one rung above a basket weaver. And America is marvelous at misunderstanding people like me,” he said.
Nevertheless, Mr. Flanagan may be one of the luckiest writers in the world because he has an excellent tactic for escaping daily distractions. When he works, he takes a ferry from Hobart, Tasmania, to a smaller island where he has a writing shack. He writes on a laptop and occasionally takes breaks to go kayaking or snorkeling. The New York magazine posted video of his retreat on its website.
“It’s as good a place as any and it was cheap. In Tasmania, there’s this shack culture. People could never afford to leave the island for holidays. They would build on crown land” — property owned by the Australian government.
Mr. Flanagan traveled to Japan to research “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” There, he had a memorable encounter with a former Japanese guard who was reviled for his extreme cruelty. POWs nicknamed him “the Lizard.” The former guard received amnesty for his war crimes in 1956.
When Richard Flanagan returned, he telephoned his father and relayed a message: “’The Lizard said he was sorry.’ My father went very quiet and then he said he had to go.”
Soon afterward, Archie Flanagan, who had previously been quite careful to be accurate in recounting his time as a war prisoner, lost all memory of his experiences on the railway.