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". Dorrigo is at first unaware that Amy is married to his uncle. Despite this fact, Dorrigo felt the affair was justified because "the war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused". 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." Dorrigo and Amy feel that their love places them outside of time as Amy at another point says: "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." 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 means of bringing supplies from Thailand to Burma for an invasion of India. One out of every three workers engaged on the Burma Death Railway died during its construction between October 1942-October 1943. ==Background==