Professor Robin Gerster, who teaches at Monash University and has published extensively on Australian war literature, has written a review of “Ray Parkin’s Odyssey” for The Age newspaper.
“His POW writings have a Homeric quality, not in the sense of celebrating battlefield virtuosity, but in their poetic largeness of spirit, in their refusal to peddle shibboleths or to buckle to self-pity, and in a pervasive if discriminating generosity that recognises the maimed humanity of the Japanese captor, men like the prisoners themselves entrapped by the all-in viciousness of war.
By the time he died, at the age of 94 in 2005, Parkin was in every way the most enduring of his generation of Australian World War II writers.”