The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Vintage International)
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • A magisterial novel of love and war that traces the life of one man from World War II to the present.
Available now on Prime Video: Justin Kurzel’s highly anticipated series based on this Booker Prize–winning novel by Richard Flanagan; starring Jacob Elordi, Ciarán Hinds, Odessa Young, Olivia DeJonge and Simon Baker.
"Magnificent." —The New York Times Book Review
"Nothing short of a masterpiece." —Financial Times
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
A savagely beautiful novel about the many forms of good and evil, of truth and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
Available now on Prime Video: Justin Kurzel’s highly anticipated series based on this Booker Prize–winning novel by Richard Flanagan; starring Jacob Elordi, Ciarán Hinds, Odessa Young, Olivia DeJonge and Simon Baker.
"Magnificent." —The New York Times Book Review
"Nothing short of a masterpiece." —Financial Times
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
A savagely beautiful novel about the many forms of good and evil, of truth and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
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Community Reviews
Very hard to follow. Characters are not defined except for main character who was a total jerk and with no (zero!) likeable qualities.
What I had suspected to be its apparent weakness turned out to be its spirit by the time the book approached its ending. For all the myriad images of life’s many ironies, there is a seething intended unemotionality with which Flanagan goes about describing, narrating, and weaving the tales around characters that come alive as and when they give themselves up in the face of their daunting lives one by one.
With themes of loneliness and its likeliness in life amidst the great hopes and expectations that human beings harbor in their minds, only to gradually fleet away as unfulfilled feelings, the author spans through lives that are connected by suffering on the Burma Death Railway and beyond.
In not attempting to pretend and find explanation for why the world is as it is or isn’t, the book is able to illuminate more moments of the palpable human space with a strangely aloof but rooted sincerity of observation:
“It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words – all the words that did not say things directly – were for him the most truthful”.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is able to portray human nature in its raw and complex form; through a manifestation of a spectrum of choices, actions and responses grounded within domains of love and war. The incessant being of being painfully human, in more pain than otherwise, is deftly stringed by the author in a stream-of-sorely-poetic-consciousness:
“When he was away from her he tried remembering more of her perfect imperfections”.
Flanagan ensures that his characters remain flawed; the imperfections manifesting in an abundance of words, and gestures. He would rather not endorse you to really like or dislike anyone. That’s one thing I have the taste of in my mouth after leaving the text. For a large part, as a reader, I found myself on a narrow road which eventually led my mind to a deep north, or a deep somewhere.
Post-reading, the surprisingly abstract title of the book got its pulse to start beating; it gradually
settled within the structure of ironies and paradox of remembrances and forgetting. The poetic warmth of haikus with which the timelessness of time is treated around the unbearable physical pain and drudgery of war is one of the glimpses the narration portrays:
“Days and months are travellers of eternity, he read. So too the years that pass by.”
Ultimately, however, the book is about the strange milieu humans are made up of; and their heart that is sinewed with what is fragile and yet what is stoically strong like an endlessly enduring quest.
With themes of loneliness and its likeliness in life amidst the great hopes and expectations that human beings harbor in their minds, only to gradually fleet away as unfulfilled feelings, the author spans through lives that are connected by suffering on the Burma Death Railway and beyond.
In not attempting to pretend and find explanation for why the world is as it is or isn’t, the book is able to illuminate more moments of the palpable human space with a strangely aloof but rooted sincerity of observation:
“It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words – all the words that did not say things directly – were for him the most truthful”.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is able to portray human nature in its raw and complex form; through a manifestation of a spectrum of choices, actions and responses grounded within domains of love and war. The incessant being of being painfully human, in more pain than otherwise, is deftly stringed by the author in a stream-of-sorely-poetic-consciousness:
“When he was away from her he tried remembering more of her perfect imperfections”.
Flanagan ensures that his characters remain flawed; the imperfections manifesting in an abundance of words, and gestures. He would rather not endorse you to really like or dislike anyone. That’s one thing I have the taste of in my mouth after leaving the text. For a large part, as a reader, I found myself on a narrow road which eventually led my mind to a deep north, or a deep somewhere.
Post-reading, the surprisingly abstract title of the book got its pulse to start beating; it gradually
settled within the structure of ironies and paradox of remembrances and forgetting. The poetic warmth of haikus with which the timelessness of time is treated around the unbearable physical pain and drudgery of war is one of the glimpses the narration portrays:
“Days and months are travellers of eternity, he read. So too the years that pass by.”
Ultimately, however, the book is about the strange milieu humans are made up of; and their heart that is sinewed with what is fragile and yet what is stoically strong like an endlessly enduring quest.
This book is stunning. There were a few bits where I found the writing a bit overdone, but I could overlook that as the way the stories are told and broken up is done so well. As with many books about war and especially prisoners of war, a lot of it is very difficult to read, but it is well told.
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