Dorrigo Evans has found fame and public recognition as a war veteran in old age, but inwardly he is plagued by his own shortcomings and considers his numerous accolades to be a “failure of perception on the part of others”. He knows that his colleagues consider him a reckless and dangerous surgeon, and he has habitually cheated on his faithful and adoring wife, though his public reputation has been undented by the air of scandal that trails him in his private life.
Flashbacks describe Dorrigo’s early life in rural Tasmania, and his love affair with Amy Mulvaney, the young wife of his uncle and the love of his life. Dorrigo meets Amy by chance in an Adelaide bookstore and he finds that "her body was a poem beyond memorising".[2] Dorrigo is at first unaware that Amy is married to his uncle.[3] Despite the fact that she is married to his uncle, Dorrigo felt the affair was justified because "the war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused".[4] In a metaphor for the novel's theme of fatalism, Amy observes while swimming a group of fish trying "to escape the breaking wave’s hold. And all the time the wave had them in its power and would take them where it would, and there was nothing that the glistening chain of fish could do to change their fate."[5] Dorrigo and Amy feel that their love places them outside of time as Amy at another point say: "You hear that? She said. The waves, the clock...Sea time, she said as another wave crashed. Man time, she said, as the clock ticked. We run on sea time."[3] Despite the end of the affair, Evans finds himself unable to forget Amy for the rest of his life and the memory of her keeps recurring.[6]
After the end of the affair, he joins the Australian Imperial Force. His regiment is captured during the Battle of Java and is sent to labour on the notorious Burma Death Railway, intended to provide the necessary supplies for an invasion of India. One out of every three workers engaged on the Burma Death Railroad died during its construction.[5] During the construction of the railroad, he is reluctantly bestowed the leadership over his fellow prisoners and fights a losing battle to protect his charges against disease, malnutrition and the violence of their captors. Dorrigo sadly observes as the bodies of his fellow POWs break down and disintegrate with "eyes that already seemed to be little more than black-shadowed sockets waiting for worms".[2] Evans finds himself sustained only by the memory of Amy and finds himself losing his spirit when he receives news of her death.[3] As one reviewer noted, the memories of Amy are "worn like armor" to protect him from the degradation and horror of the Burma Death Railroad.[6] The camp's commander, Major Nakamura, a methamphetamine addict who pushes his prisoners harder and harder out of the fear of failing the Emperor, is in his own way just as much a prisoner of the railroad project as the men he brutalises.[4]
A major theme of the novel concerns the Australian value of "mateship" -- a sense of camaraderie and loyalty -- or the absence of "mateship" on the Burma Death Railroad.[5] Among the POWs is the energetic and hardworking Tiny Middleton who wants "to show them little yellow bastards what a white man is" by overfilling his work quotas, thereby inspiring the Japanese to set higher work quotas that lead to the deaths of the weaker POWs.[5] Other POWs include the artistic Rabbit Hendricks who secretly makes drawings of camp life (which could lead to his execution if the drawings are discovered), the white supremacist Rooster MacNeice who has trouble accepting that he is now a prisoner of the Japanese, and the defiant Darky Gardiner who is repeatedly beaten by the guards and finally drowns himself in a latrine full of excrement rather than endure another beating.[5]
The Burma Death Railway today in Thanbyuzayat, Myanmar.After the war, the fates of the prisoners and captors are shown. The "Goanna", a Korean man renowned for his brutality in the prison camp who was himself forced into the Japanese army, is hanged for his crimes. His superior officer, Major Nakamura, returns to Tokyo and avoids capture as a war criminal by hiding among the ruins of Shinjuku. After a conversation with a Japanese doctor who served with Unit 731 in Manchukuo reveals to him the country’s human experimentation program during the war, he gradually absolves himself of any sense of guilt for his actions. Other Australian soldiers imprisoned with Dorrigo live through the trauma of their experience as prisoners. Dorrigo’s own acts of heroism, and the reverence of his fellow soldiers, fail to assuage his sense of shame and self-loathing. Dorrigo comes to "feel the more people I am with...the more alone I feel".[2] Evans reflects after the war: “There were only two sorts of men, the men who were on the Line, and the rest of humanity, who were not."[6]
