The Railway Man
By: Eric Lomax / Narrated By: Bill Paterson
Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
The ending? Oh, the ending! Tissue, please!
The irony of a railway fanatic being put on the “Railway of Death”, the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma, is not lost on the listener in this, The Railway Man. Eric Lomax’s audiobook opens with him as a child, an enthusiast and radio buff, and takes us through his time in the army to the fall of Singapore in 1942.
And that’s where Lomax’s utter Hell starts. The Railway Man is a memoir of deprivation, of torture, of extreme loneliness, of PTSD before there was the coining of the term.
At first, and don’t hate me for this, but I listened to Unbroken, I was quite unfeeling as I listened to the scenes of torture. Yes, yes, yes! I TOTALLY agree with you and your low opinion of me, but Unbroken was a NIGHTMARE of a book, so very, very much seems to fall by the wayside, if someone happens to be a jerk enough to compare the two. Yeah, I’m totally ashamed with what was my insensitive attitude there.
But I got over it—I assure you. You can’t visualize a man with two broken arms getting waterboarded and NOT feeling anything. It’s a horror show, I tell you. And Lomax makes himself even sicker, jeopardizes his precarious health even further to get out of the HELL of the camp so that he might be taken to a “hospital” situation where he gets decent, though slight, food. And there’s the utter joy of seeing and being around other prisoners he thought were long dead. Once there, he has to juggle being sick (staying there) with recuperation (being well enough to go back to the prisoner camp). All this because he, as a POW, was caught with a self-drawn map of the railway. To him, it was just a token of his almost fanatical regard for all this railway; to the Japanese, it was proof of espionage being plotted.
The audiobook isn’t all about his confinement and torture. It goes on to Lomax’s life afterward and to his difficulties with, well, everything that comes with a civilian life. Nobody understands what he went through; indeed, he CAN’T bring himself to speak of any of it. And he keeps it stuffed inside for decades where it shows itself through extremes in passivity and non-expression, and bouts of uncontrollable rage, especially at people whom he sees as authority figures of some sort.
It’s not until he meets a true love, until he finds out about a hospital where war stress is studied, that he actually learns to share. But in the back of his mind, he still wants to kill his torturers, to rain down vengeance upon them.
And then he discovers the identity of the interpreter who witnessed and abetted in his torture. And then he wants to see him, to kill him.
The Railway Man then turns into one of the most beautifully written pieces on pain, suffering, forgiveness. It doesn’t come easily, but Eric Lomax finds ways to heal his mind, heart, his very soul. There is such humor and light at the end of the book that I found a definite lump in my throat SEVERAL times. Truly lovely. And through it all is Bill Paterson who voiced enthusiasm, despair, utter rage, confusion, enlightenment: You name it, and Paterson guided the listener through it.
Truly, a really good audiobook, and I can’t thank one of my friends enough for suggesting it. She read the print copy and was moved. But I found listening to it was a real treat with Paterson at the helm. Definitely an audiobook, a story, that won’t be forgotten soon.
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