Vietnam War

The Vietnam War enters the novel through a late-afternoon Sydney crowded with American servicemen on rest and recreation. Their presence gives the city a current wartime atmosphere, but the scene’s focus is Dorrigo Evans, whose walk through the city follows a family revelation and passes through memories of an earlier war. The Vietnam-era setting thus places present military life beside the unfinished consequences of the Second World War.

The Vietnam-era setting

Sydney is described as full of American GIs on R&R. The city is sweltering, and Dorrigo wants to get away from both the heat and the crowds. The passage does not depict combat or specify the servicemen’s individual experiences; it registers the war through their presence in the city, where military leave and urban routine occupy the same streets.

For Dorrigo, this public atmosphere coincides with a private shock. Tom Evans has just told him that the son he never met was raised by a Gardiner family, named Frank, and died during the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. The disclosure gives Dorrigo’s walk an immediate purpose beyond escape from the crowded city: he is trying to absorb a newly revealed family loss as well as the older history of captivity that the Vietnam-era scene brings into view.

Dorrigo’s walk through Sydney

Dorrigo follows his own advice to patients that walking is the best medicine. He leaves the hospital for Circular Quay, then crosses the Sydney Harbour Bridge on his way to visit a surgeon friend in Kirribilli. The bridge’s wide walkway and expansive views offer temporary distance from the press of the city, while the walk gives physical form to his attempt to come to terms with what Tom has told him.

He pauses at the bridge’s side rail and looks over the water and the city. When he resumes walking, he glimpses a woman in the distance stepping from shadow into light. The Vietnam-era setting does not resolve Dorrigo’s private history; instead, it supplies the present moment in which an encounter and the weight of the past can meet.

An earlier war beneath the present

The narrative sets this later urban scene against the history of the Death Railway. During the Second World War, twenty-two thousand Australian POWs were among the prisoners held by the Japanese Empire, and nine thousand were sent to work on the railway. When locomotive C 5631 made the first journey along the completed line on 25 October 1943, it passed the remains of prisoners who had died during its construction. The railway’s labor force also included hundreds of thousands of Asian workers; estimates of their deaths vary widely, and the total is unknown.

The novel’s account of the railway’s later commemoration sharpens the contrast with the present. C 5631 is displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, alongside the Book of Souls, but its plaque omits the railway’s suffering and the names of those who died building it. The narrator stresses that many of those laborers have no memorial or recorded names. Dorrigo’s postwar work on a foreword about illustrations of the POW camps likewise remains, even when completed, an unsuccessful attempt to explain what the railway meant.

War, justice, and remembrance

The postwar record described in the novel offers neither complete accounting nor equal justice. An Australian military court sentences Choi Sang-min for crimes including ordering the death of a prisoner and withholding food and medical supplies. Yet the evidence against him is compromised by confused camp records and by Colonel Kota’s testimony; Choi also believes that some better-connected officers escaped prosecution. The passage presents judgment as a process shaped by gaps in the archive and unequal consequences, not as a full restoration of what was lost.

A separate recollection concerns the wartime vivisections of American airmen. After the war, Professor Ishiyama dies in prison, while others receive death sentences that are later commuted and are eventually released. The speaker says that both the Americans and the Japanese want the matter forgotten. Set beside Sydney’s American servicemen on R&R, these histories make the Vietnam War a present-day marker rather than a resolution: another war is under way, while earlier violence, uneven accountability, and the loss of individual lives remain unsettled.