The Narrow Road to the Deep North: A novel (Vintage International)

Something was happening inside Dorrigo Evans as he watched. Here were three hundred men watching three men destroying a man whom they knew, and yet they did nothing.

War, though, is its own logic.

Harry, he said, as gently as he could, as though waking a child. I am become a carrion monster. The next in line was Ray Hale, whom they had managed to bring through cholera. He too Dorrigo touched on the shoulder. Ray, he said. Thou art come unto a feast of death. Ray, he said. Dread Charon, frightful and foul.

These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said. The journalist said he had done a story on the survivors, had met and filmed them. Their suffering, he had said, was terrible and life-long. It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is

He alone sensed the strangeness at the heart of his transformation into his idea of a good man. Was it hypocrisy? Was it atonement? Guilt? Shame? Was it deliberate or unconscious? Was it a lie or was it the truth?

How far away was his home? wondered Dorrigo. Was it a farm? Was it a city? Some place, some valley, some street, a lane, an alley, that he perhaps dreamt of, a place of sun and winds that caressed and rains that refreshed, of people who cared for him and laughed with him, a place far away from this stink of decay, the smothering green, the pain and

Others denied responsibility, pointing out the impossibility of a lowly guard or soldier refusing to recognise the authority of the Japanese military system, far less refusing to do the Emperor’s will. In private they asked a simple question. If they and all their actions were simply expressions of the Emperor’s will, why then was the Emperor still

His tone, he felt, was at once too obvious and too personal; somehow it brought to his mind the questions he had failed to resolve all his life.

built like a scream that never ended,

The Trojan horse, an offering to the gods in which hid the death of men, one thing containing another.