The affair is somehow permissible because "the war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused". He is elevated to medicine as a scholarship boy, and, in a splendid set piece in an Adelaide bookshop, Dorrigo, now a military surgeon, meets a small-framed, gleaming-eyed and galvanising woman named Amy. Innocent of electricity, his family "slept under skins of possums they snared". Dorrigo's boyhood took place far from the grief and benefits of the big world, however. By his middle years he is a national figure – his own face staring back at him "from charity letterheads to memorial coins". His Australian protagonist is a surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, who to his own amazement becomes legendary in postwar Australia for his wartime courage in the face of Japanese captors. Let me say, though, that his book ranges far in time and human fascination beyond that central and barbarous piece of engineering. His father was an Australian prisoner of war on the infamous "narrow road", and the railway ran through his childhood, too. R ichard Flanagan, the Tasmanian writer acclaimed for such novels as Death of a River Guide and Gould's Book of Fish, has a right to focus on the so-called Burma railway, built with forced labour by the Japanese in the second world war.
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