richard flanagan long road to the deep north

From his ambitious debut, Death of a River Guide (1997), an extended flashback telling the life story of a man at the moment of his drowning, to Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, to Wanting (2008), which told the parallel stories of Charles Dickens and an Aborigine girl adopted by the colonial governor of Van Diemen’s Land, he has produced original, deeply considered novels. In the jungle, each man clings to something like hope to get through, and the novel traces Dorrigo’s journey to hell and not quite back again as later, a war hero, he tries to reconcile what he did as the camp’s “Big Fella” with his failings and extra-marital infidelities after the war.įlanagan is one of Australia’s finest novelists. He struggles against the barbarism of nature and the Japanese guards to keep his men alive as cholera, starvation and beatings carry them off. Two years later, Dorrigo is leader of a camp of Australian PoWs deep in the dripping teak forests of Siam. There he begins an affair with Keith’s much younger wife Amy, which, while only brief, marks him for the rest of his life. His embrace of the beauty and poetry in this and other works of Japanese literature, while examining the darkness of the historical moment, is a mark of how finely attuned Flanagan’s art is to the complexities, cosmic ironies and vast human frailties at play.ĭorrigo Evans, a young Australian surgeon waiting for deployment, pays a visit to his uncle Keith, who runs the King of Cornwall pub on the coast near Adelaide.

The novel examines the plight of Australian PoWs at the hands of their Japanese captors while building the Burma Death Railway during the final years of the second world war. The haibun – a combination of prose and haiku – is one of the greats of classical Japanese literature and tells of his wandering from Edo (now Tokyo) into the country’s interior and the hardships he faced there.Īustralian novelist Richard Flanagan has taken not only Basho’s title for his 2014 Man Booker-longlisted novel, but has also imbued his work with some of the spare precision and Zen meditations of its predecessor. In the spring of 1689, the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho went on a journey that would form the basis of his most famous work: Oku no Hosomichi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Richard flanagan long road to the deep north