The Narrow Road to the Deep North

As part of a school project, Jimmy Bigelow’s daughter Jodie asks him to tell her about the war. He shows her his bugle and plays “Last Post” but says that he wasn’t there for much of the war. He says the POWs were “lucky, we only had to suffer” (382). Jimmy’s wife has been dead for 28 years, and he has come to see the universe as a massive comedy. His memory is deteriorating, and the time he spent in the camp only comes back to him in brief flashes: “First he forgot the horror of it all, later the violence done to them by the Japanese” (384). At age 90, he remembers nothing of the camps and is a free man. 

A carful of three drunken teenagers hit Dorrigo’s car at an intersection. Two of them die and Dorrigo is critically injured. For three days in the hospital he dreams of light, of Amy, and of women: “He was stunned to realize that his life was only just beginning, and in a faraway teak jungle that had long since been cleared, in a country called Siam that no longer existed, a man who no longer lived had finally fallen asleep” (386). 

It is the day when the officers forced Dorrigo to choose 100 men to march to the Three Pagoda Pass camp, which had been 100 miles away. He had told Nakamura no man in camp could survive the march. As he tries to decide, a group of Japanese soldiers marches through the parade ground. They looked “as much the wretched of war as the POWs themselves, broken, bedraggled, exhausted” (388). A young soldier stops to look at Dorrigo and is thrashed with a rod by his commanding officer. Dorrigo knows the boy is as confused by his place in the war as Dorrigo is with his own.

He walks through the men, looking at their feet and illnesses, and tries to pick the least ill and wounded for the march. The 100 men shake his hand, one by one, and march into the forest: “When it was done, he walked off into the jungle at the side of the parade ground and wept” (391).

Dorrigo is delirious at the hospital. He hears nurses talking but does not know where he is. He recites poetry. He dreams of the 100 men shaking his hand before marching to their deaths. His mother’s voice comes to him, then Amy’s. He remembers Lynette Maison and the illustrations of Guy Hendricks. Then he remembers the black circle of the famous Japanese poet’s death poem, and “he felt the void he was becoming” (394). Finally, he dies. 

In the camp, Bonox reports Darky’s death in the latrine to Dorrigo. Dorrigo lists it in his journal as a murder. Dorrigo sees his reflection in a small shaving mirror the next day and compares himself to Charon, the ferryman who would row dead souls to Hades after their deaths. That day he receives a letter from Ella that is six months old. She includes a newspaper clipping that reads: “ADELAIDE HOTEL TRAGEDY.” A gas explosion had blown up the King and Cornwall, killing Keith. Three other people were unaccounted for, and most assumed that Amy was dead.

He tries to read a novel, a romance, hoping it will distract him: “Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page” (398). The final pages had been ripped away, so there was no conclusion: “Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. He would live in hell, because love is that also” (398). He goes outside to relieve himself and sees something growing at the side of the muddy trail. It is a crimson flower.