By Eric Lomax, 1995

Apologies for my long absence from this blog. Besides being busy with gardening and grandchildren, I have had months of computer problems. These have been alleviated by having Windows 10 removed from my computer and going back to Windows 7. I hope this is the beginning of a return to more frequent posting.

I first read The Railway Man about 20 years ago for a reader’s advisory workshop at the library. The story it tells has haunted me ever since, so I was thrilled to find a copy in a second-hand bookstore in Las Vegas a few years ago. I don’t know the name of the store because its business card fell out of the book during my fevered rereading. The book drew me in even more swiftly the second time, because I have travelled to Asia half a dozen times in the last decade and visited Malaysia and Singapore this year.

When you reread a book you know what is going to happen. Knowing what was going to happen made me feel a terrible dread for the clueless young man whose childhood and adolescence were poor preparation for war. The only child of serious parents, Lomax had an early and continuing obsession with railways in general and with steam locomotives in particular. Railway maps and timetables were an aspect of this obsession.

As the war in Asia begins, Lomax is in Singapore as a signals officer. Although the fortress is supposed to be impregnable, the land and naval forces of the British and their allies have little defense against Japanese bombing. Left behind enemy lines, Lomax and his mates are quickly taken prisoner. At first the regime seems benign; the screws tighten over time.

In an ironic twist of fate, given his railway obsession, Lomax ends up working on the Burma railway. He is tortured along with a number of his mates when their warders discover a radio receiver that Lomax has had a part although not the lead role in making, and then a map that he has carefully drawn on his own. The map and the receiver are seen as evidence of an escape plan and the Japanese are convinced the prisoners must have contact with the locals or with the Chinese. No amount of explaining can make the technologically backward captors understand it is impossible to turn a receiver into a transmitter.

I have read many prison and concentration camp narratives, fiction and non-fiction. This is one of the best because of the way the author evokes the horror of wooden axe handles smashing into human flesh, and of insects biting and crawling over the skin of prisoners forbidden to move or so weak and damaged from torture and starvation they cannot brush the biters off. He also conveys the heroic supportiveness of prisoners for one another and the short- and long-term psychic costs of such an ordeal.

Lomax and other veterans who have essentially been to hell and back return to a homeland where no one wants to hear their story. Those who stayed behind make dismissive remarks about prisoners of war sitting out the war doing nothing while those back home struggled with bombing, fire fighting and rationing. They have no idea of the “nothing” Lomax and other veterans have been through and they don’t want to know. People who have not been there are as contemptuous of the POW experience as Donald Trump of John McCain, although more polite. The well-fed actors in the 1953 film The Bridge on the River Kwai were further proof to the folks not captured by the Japanese of how easy the POWs had it.

The Burma-Siam railway was a project as futile, wasteful, and brutal as Stalin’s White Sea Canal. The subsequent lives of many of the survivors of the railway were blighted by what we now call PTSD. Lomax is obsessed with the translator who in a monotone endlessly repeated the questions of the torturer and in Lomax’s mind becomes the torturer. Of this man, Lomax writes, the translator was “. . . the only one I had ever been able to endow with a personality across the years.” Lomax wakes up screaming and longing for revenge.

With the help of his second wife he arranges a meeting with the translator, whose name is Nagase Takashi. Their meeting and subsequent friendship are beautiful and hopeful parts of the story. Takashi, who since the war has worked tirelessly for peace and reconciliation, does not excuse what the Japanese did, but he does partially explain it by saying there were so many prisoners and so few Japanese.

A few months before rereading this book, I enjoyed a short visit to Singapore. I congratulated myself on my ability—extraordinary I felt for an aging white woman—to withstand the heat and humidity. Getting home I explained to friends that the key to surviving at the equator is to stay well hydrated and to stick to the shady side of the street. We also spent a lot of time in air-conditioned malls, although the only actual shopping I did was at Kinokinuya Books.

For Lomax and other POWs there was no shady side of the street and there were no air-conditioned malls. Water was withheld from them most of the time, and they were forced to stand for hours in the blazing sun without moving a muscle. Being reminded of their experience made my time in Singapore seem less heroic.

I have not seen the 2013 film starring Nicolle Kidman and Colin Firth. I find it easier to read about violence than to see it on the screen, although it would be interesting to see how the violence is handled in the movie.