Falling out of the Sun 
 How would it be, I wonder, to come upon this book as one's first encounter with Richard Flanagan, not having known 
 Wanting 
 or the extraordinary 
 Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish 
 ? The opening chapters would be a puzzle: wartime memories, bedroom encounters, scraps of dialogue dotting about in time over a span of fifty years. But you would sense you were in the presence of a master right from page 8, when a young Tasmanian boy, Dorrigo Evans, playing in a schoolyard game, sees a football coming towards him over the heads of his schoolmates. "He understood the ball dangling from the sun was his and all he had to do was rise." The scene where he jumps over the older boys to catch it is brilliant in its language--but now when I go back to quote from it, it is the closing paragraph of the chapter that strikes me most: 
 And so in the deepest recesses of his being, Dorrigo Evans understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after. Nothing would ever be as real for him. Life never had such meaning again. 
 That surprising flip of tenses in the last two sentences is typical of Flanagan's novel as a whole, entire lives captured in framing moments: a brief incandescent present, a past looking forward, and a future that looks back. Colonel Dorrigo Evans is a surgeon with the Australian army in WW2, sent first to the Eastern Mediterranean, recalled to the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, and captured by the Japanese after the fall of Java. But the times that sear him to the bone are his months in command of a group of POWs being worked to death to build a railway through the jungle linking Siam and Burma. He will spend the rest of his life shaking off the title of Australian Hero that his countrymen bestow on him, but there really is something heroic in the character he shows as a leader and physician in such horrific conditions. 
 With the middle hundred pages or so of this novel, Flanagan reaches an intensity that few other writers can equal. Indeed, the cover should carry a warning that this is not for the faint-hearted; I found this part very painful to read, and succumbed to a night of nightmares. And yet how could it not be so? Flanagan describes the war crimes of the Japanese without resorting to the easy out of treating them as inhuman monsters; what they do is that much more horrible because they are indeed human. He quickly dismisses the romantic notion of the good old British Empire spirit somehow winning through; these are men reduced to the condition of animals, dying of cholera, malnutrition, ulcerated sores, or sheer exhaustion, but still finding some reserves of common humanity. 
 If I had to pick a single passage to illustrate Flanagan's greatness, it would be pages 186 and 187. A bugler, Jimmy Bigelow, plays the Last Post at one of the improvised funerals that happen almost daily. His palate shredded by ulcers and his tongue swollen with pellagra, he can hardly blow air into his instrument. 
 And though his whole body was aflame while playing this terrible bugle call, this music of death, still he played on, hearing it all anew, not understanding what it meant, hating that they had died, knowing that he had to keep playing this music he hated above all other music, but was determined never to stop playing. 
 And before you know it, Flanagan has worked a miracle. With hardly a pause for breath, he takes Jimmy Bigelow beyond the war, beyond the Anzac Day reunions, beyond becoming a father and grandfather, to a point where all the other ninety years of his life dissolve, leaving only this moment. Whether it endows it with meaning or robs it of meaning, that one look forward makes it bearable. 
 A hundred pages before the end of the novel, the war ends, and Flanagan goes back to something of the impressionistic storytelling of the beginning. While he continues to follow Dorrigo Evans, he also revisits some other survivors, and--unexpectedly--several of their former captors. Among these, there are those who are brought to trial and those who escape, but whose lives are changed in other ways. In a sense, it all seems random; you look in vain for some dispensing angel who metes out punishment to the wicked and awards well-deserved laurels to the good. But that, I think, is Flanagan's point; after such experiences, life cannot go on as before; the most one can hope from it is to make some attempt at love and reach a kind of self-understanding. It takes daring to construct a novel with such a long dying fall, but Flanagan achieves moments of deep beauty and human observations that show a deeply rooted moral sense. Though there is one more nail-biting episode of life and death just before the end, I find I appreciate Flanagan even more in the twilight than for those moments in the blazing sun. 
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 It interests me that, with the exception of the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, most other fictions about Japanese POW camps seem to focus equally much on the postwar years. Neville Shute's A Town Like Alice, though a more conventional romance, is about the challenge of making a go of it in everyday life after the war is over. The same is true of 
 The Great World 
 by fellow-Australian David Malouf, which continues for many decades after its life-defining peak. And 
 The Railway Man 
 (both the memoir by Eric Lomax and the recent movie made from it) focuses on the former prisoner's return to confront the man who had tortured him while building the same railway that Flanagan treats in his fiction. It is an entire coincidence that the book I read just before this, 
 The Aftermath 
 by Rhidian Brook, also deals with the period after war has done its worst (in this case, in a German setting). Can it be that our generation, preoccupied with just getting on, no longer needs the old heroic stories with their moral absolutes? Or is it simply that we no longer trust them?