Man Booker Prize Winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North by R. Flanagan

This year's Book Prize was awarded Richard Flanagan's novel.  THE NARROW ROAD.. is a  disturbingly graphic account of Australians in Japanese POW camps and a sappy love story.  The dichotomy doesn't work. We follow Dr. Dorrigo Evans from childhood to his senior years; in a nonlinear timeline.  He proves himself a man of strength & leadership during the Hellish years held captive by the Japanese during WWII.   But, on the home front, he is an unloving husband & absent father.  Dorrigo desires only what he can't have; Amy, his uncle's wife.  Amy may have been the love & pinnacle of his life. Their relationship reads like a soap opera.  His philandering & his facade of congeniality are at odds with his heroism endured under the barbaric treatment of POW's.  The book felt written by 2 authors.  One writer captured the terror & Hell of war from both the allies & enemies viewpoints.  The other writer wrote a melodramatic made for TV movie about a torrid affair & unrequited love.  There were stirring & poetic observations on being held prisoner, "Because courage, survival, love-all these things didn't live in one man.  They lived in them all or they died and everyman with them; they had to come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves."  And, the silly love story took a diametrical perspective, "One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all."  Sometimes this novel was a masterpiece of elegance & power and sometimes maudlin drivel.  I narrowly give this a thumbs up and a thumbs pointing south on receiving the Man Booker Prize.