The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Richard Flanagan
Summary
Dorrigo Evans is an Australian surgeon and, later, a decorated national figure he does not believe in. In 1943 he is the senior officer in a prisoner of war camp on the Thailand to Burma railway, responsible for keeping alive men the Japanese engineers are working to death, choosing every morning which of the sick are well enough to be sent out.
Around that runs an affair, before the war, with his uncle's young wife, and after it a long life of adultery and public honours that never touches him. The novel moves freely between the three periods and refuses to organise them into a redemption.
Flanagan writes the camp sections with a plainness that is genuinely hard to read: the ulcers, the cholera, the beatings, and one extended sequence of a man being killed by degrees that most readers remember for years. He also gives the Japanese officers their own chapters and their own reasoning, which is the braver decision and the one that lifts the book out of atrocity narrative.
Go in prepared. This is among the most harrowing novels to win the Booker, and the love story that frames it has divided readers, some finding it the necessary counterweight and others finding it slight beside what surrounds it. The prisoner of war chapters are beyond argument.
It is not long by the standards of war novels and it moves quickly, but expect to need breaks. Readers who have avoided fiction about the Second World War because it tends toward the heroic will find nothing heroic here at all.
Historical Context & Significance
The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Booker Prize in 2014, Richard Flanagan's sixth novel. He is the third Australian to win it and the first Tasmanian.
The book came directly out of his family. Flanagan's father was a Japanese prisoner of war and a slave labourer on the Death Railway, and the novel took twelve years and several abandoned drafts. His father died at ninety eight on the day it was finished.
Flanagan has said he was close to giving up writing altogether and had looked into work in the mines once the book was finished, a detail that circulated widely after the win and reframed the prize as a rescue rather than a coronation. The title is taken from Basho, and the novel's use of Japanese poetry against the railway is one of its organising ideas.