The Narrow Road to the Deep North

‘My father was a Japanese POW who worked as a slave labourer on the Death Railway, a crime against humanity that saw more people die than the bomb killed at either Nagasaki or Hiroshima. If Basho’s ’The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is rightly celebrated as one of the high points of Japanese culture, my father’s experience was of one of its lowest. 

‘It is for readers and God to judge, but for the novelist only to point. To escape the error of judgment, I sought to use the forms and tropes of Japanese literature – which I love – to help in the futile but necessary task of seeking to divine the undivinable. Murder, hate and horror are as deeply buried in the human heart as love and beauty, perhaps more so, and in truth they’re rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you’d be missing what was most important and human.’

Read the full interview here.

‘The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism.’

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

‘The story casts its roving eye on 77-year-old Dr. Dorrigo Evans, a celebrated war hero whose life has been an unsatisfying string of sterile affairs and public honors. He loved a woman once, but tragedy intervened, and since then each new award and commendation only makes Dorrigo feel undeserving and fraudulent […] For many pages, the novel shimmers over the decades of Dorrigo’s life, only flashing on the horrors of war and the ghosts who haunt him. But soon enough, that unspeakable period comes into focus in a series of blistering episodes you will never get out of your mind.’

Amelia Lester, The New Yorker

‘Flanagan’s prose in Narrow Road has often been described as ‘unflinching,’ and there’s certainly no shortage of violence in the passages about the prison camp, but he can be unflinching about desire, too. What strikes me most is the way Flanagan writes about the vivid and terrifying experience of falling in love […] Flanagan’s tender, direct way of writing about the body is reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence, and some have found this side of his work a little embarrassing, even cheesy, but I’m moved by Flanagan’s sentimental men, known in the beginning as numbers and by the end revealed to possess secret wells of sentiment. In Narrow Road, Dorrigo is celebrated for his machismo and for being a paragon of his gender: brave, strong, stoic. Australians traditionally value hyper-masculine men who don’t expose their vulnerabilities, and Flanagan is deliberately writing against type.’

Michael Gorra, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

‘Flanagan has done something difficult here, creating a character who is at once vivid and shadowy. In his long postwar life, Dorrigo will see his own moments of heroism as if performed by someone else. He fulfills his duty while remaining separate from it, and as a husband and father is most often an absent presence […] Flanagan manages these shifts in time and perspective with extraordinary skill. They’re never confusing but they are dizzying, and demand the reader’s full attention in a way that reminds me of Conrad. I suspect that on rereading, this magnificent novel will seem even more intricate, more carefully and beautifully constructed.’

David Wright, The Seattle Times

‘In his youth before the war, Dorrigo fell desperately in love with young Amy Mulvaney, the wife of his uncle Keith. In describing their all-consuming affair, Flanagan seems at times to have turned the pen over to his besotted hero. Memories of their superlative passion provide a respite for the reader in the horrors that are to come, as they do for Dorrigo himself […] There are passages toward the middle of Flanagan’s book that rival Dante in their unrelenting depictions of nightmarish atrocity and degradation and of staggering futility. It is in describing this crucible of suffering that Flanagan’s own poetic mastery is most keenly felt and appreciated. One could not wish a more capable Virgil to guide our steps through this hell.’

Justin Cartwright, The Guardian

‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North is extraordinarily ambitious. It is perhaps too ambitious, although ambition is not a sin in my book. There are moments of great beauty but also moments of great bathos […] The prisoners have to walk seven miles each way through the jungle before they start work, often day and night. Towards the end some are crawling or dying. But still they are beaten. It is appallingly graphic, and very hard to read, page after page […] This is a heroic book marred by its determination to demonstrate high seriousness, which often collapses into pop philosophy. But for all its overstriving, this is a book you should read. It is unquestionably a work of astonishing energy and Richard Flanagan is unquestionably highly talented.’