The Narrow Road to the Deep North

June 23, 2014
From bestselling Australian writer Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish) comes a supple meditation on memory, trauma, and empathy that is also a sublime war novel. Initially, it is related through the reminiscences of Dorrigo Evans, a 77-year-old surgeon raised in Tasmania whose life has been filtered through two catastrophic events: the illicit love affair he embarked on with Amy Mulvaney, his uncle’s wife, as a young recruit in the Australian corps and his WWII capture by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. Most of the novel recounts Dorrigo’s experience as a POW in the Burmese jungle on the “speedo,” horrific work sessions on the “Death Railway” that leave most of his friends dead from dysentery, starvation, or violence. While Amy, with the rest of the world, believes him dead, Dorrigo’s only respite comes from the friends he tries to keep healthy and sane, fellow sufferers such as Darky Gardiner, Lizard Brancussi, and Rooster MacNiece. Yet it is Dorrigo’s Japanese adversary, Major Nakamura, Flanagan’s most conflicted and fully realized character, whose view of the war—and struggles with the Emperor’s will and his own postwar fate—comes to overshadow Dorrigo’s story, especially in the novel’s bracing second half. Pellucid, epic, and sincerely touching in its treatment of death, this is a powerful novel. 50,000-copy first printing.

August 7, 2013
In Tasmania, a new book by Richard Flanagan is a much-anticipated event. He is, after all, a local hero. But he is much more than that, and with each book published his Australian and international reputation grows. The Narrow Road to the Deep North will continue this trajectory. It is a grand book. The story centres on Dorrigo Evans’ life as a surgeon in a prisoner of war camp on the Burma Railway. Dorrigo is a complex man who, for all his shortcomings, provides leadership and comfort to his men. Flanagan’s depictions of the men who are building the railway are fine portraits of Australians, good and bad; these depictions are cleverly balanced later in the book when Flanagan examines the effects of the war on the prison guards. The difference between the European/Australian and the Oriental/Japanese way of thinking is also used to great effect. At the beginning of the war Dorrigo meets a woman in a bookshop in Adelaide before being sent overseas for service. At the end of the war he marries another woman—the one he was expected to marry. The war leaves Dorrigo deeply unhappy; he behaves badly towards his family, while his reputation as a war hero grows. I truly believe anyone with an interest in Australia will enjoy this book. The trick will be getting it into the hands of nonfiction readers who will benefit from the understanding that only fiction can deliver. There is a particularly apt line in this book: ‘A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your soul.’ Will we get some national soul-searching from this book? We should.

Clive Tilsley is the owner and director of Fullers Bookshop