In 2018, it was announced that Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) would be made into a “high-end drama series” by FremantleMedia. Jo Porter, Fremantle’s director of drama, called the novel “ripe for screen adaptation with huge visual potential and scale”. A somewhat more circumspect Flanagan referred to “the depth and the occasional brilliance of which the form [television] is now capable”. My italics.
Whether or not these screen aspirations come to pass will be known on April 18, when the first episode airs on Prime. If you’ve clicked on this article hoping for an early verdict or a bit of insider goss, you’ll be disappointed to learn that I have vowed not to give anything away until then. Which will be easy for me, because I haven’t seen it yet.
So what am I doing here then? Getting you all excited about a series you’ve been pining for since former prime minister Tony Abbott shirtfronted the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award committee with one of his classic “captain’s picks”, naming Narrow Road the joint winner alongside the committee’s preferred choice, Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People?
Well, I’m here to remind you that “at the beginning of things there is always light”. So begins Flanagan’s novel: a light-filled, dust-mote-swirling tribute to his father, who spent three years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the second world war.
Along with 13,000 other Australians, Flanagan’s father was put to work on the infamous Thai-Burma “death” railway. This 12-month railroad project was to claim the lives of more than 90,000 Asian civilians and 16,000 prisoners, including 2,800 Australians. It has since “entered the Australian consciousness as a byword for courage and resilience in the face of extreme hardship”.
Flanagan drew criticism from Australian critic Roger Pulvers in an early review of the book, for “giving the impression it was mostly Australians who died constructing the Death Railroad”. Given his proximity to the story, the author can probably be forgiven for such narratorial decisions. Narrow Road is the story Flanagan said he “never wanted to write”, but which, after 12 years and five different versions, accepted he “had to write”. His father passed away the night he completed the final draft.
In the decade since, the novel has been extensively reviewed, anecdotes like the one above have been worked into numerous profile pieces, and Flanagan’s status as a major Australian writer has been conferred by dozens of book clubs the country over. It is safe to assume the television series will not only please longtime fans, but draw new cohorts of readers to his book.
With this in mind, it is worth revisiting the novel to see just how well it fares in 2025. What are its enduring legacies? Do its depictions of valour and heroism continue to resonate in an age of renewed military aggression? Are its literary controversies behind it? The now-deceased poet Les Murray responded to Abbott’s intervention by labelling Narrow Road a “pretentious and stupid book”. Has Murray had the last, full-bellied laugh?
Before, during, after
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is broken into sections that roughly equate to before, during and after internment, with a lot of time-jumping in between and around the margins.
For my money, it’s the “during” section that works best on the page, with its mythologies of mateship and its visceral poetics doing what they’ve been doing since an avenging Achilles circled the walls of Troy with Hector’s body in tow. Longstanding staples of the genre they may be, but effective and affective they remain.
The novel’s protagonist, Alwyn “Dorrigo” Evans, is based in part on real-life war hero and surgeon Edward “Weary” Dunlop, who was among the first Australian prisoners sent to work on the railway in 1943. He remained there until the end of the war, “labouring tirelessly to save wounded, sick and malnourished men”.
But as the “after” section of Narrow Road reveals, Dorrigo Evans is also part Ulysses, of the Tennysonian variety. He is a man who arrives home from his perilous voyages “a part of all that [he has] met” along the way, and deeply depressed by the dullness of having to pause now “to make an end”.
In the novel, this dullness comes in the form of loyal but passionless love, otherwise known as marriage. Dorrigo spends the postwar decades doing his best to rekindle the memory of his pre-war affair with his uncle’s younger wife, Amy – the only woman he has ever properly desired. But nothing he does (or rather, nobody he does) quite gets him there.
In this regard, Dorrigo is a classic flawed hero. He is an immovable pillar of emotional support for the allied soldiers dying around him in the choleric jungles of Thailand. But he is an absent father and adulterous husband to the family who crave his love and attention in the ensuing quiet years back home.
Suffering myths
How we commemorate conflict and to what end we employ the archetypes born therein has a lot to do with the way we view ourselves as a nation. As historian Joan Beaumont puts it:
The memory of war has played a prominent role in Australia’s political culture since the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 gave birth to the ‘Anzac legend’, a mythologised account of the character and performance of the citizen soldier that endures to this day as a signifier of national identity.
Since the release of Peter Weir’s 1981 cinematic masterpiece commemorating the Gallipoli campaign, the predominant story told of Australian soldiers, on page and screen, has been one of suffering and sacrifice.
It is interesting to consider the image of this enduring archetype in light of more recent revelations about Australian military personnel. Dorrigo’s extramarital transgressions seem quotidian, even quaint, when put alongside Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, for example.
Cast in a different mould entirely, Roberts-Smith was a hero celebrated for his warring elitism, as opposed to his murdered innocence. His ascension to household-name status represented a notable break from the tradition of noble Christ-like suffering.
It’s a somewhat strained comparison to make. But Flanagan and the Australian War Memorial – which in 2023 was put in the difficult position of deciding what to do with their Roberts-Smith-themed tribute to Australian armed forces following allegations of war crimes and domestic abuse – are both in the business of telling stories and national myth-making.
Flanagan’s protagonist is not entirely naïve to the mythical forces seeking to co-opt his experiences. One reviewer diagnosed the book’s condition as being “at once appalled and respectful in its acknowledgement of the prisoners’ suffering, but anxious not to idealise their camaraderie, their courage or their powers of endurance”.
Dorrigo understands that “the cult of Christ makes of suffering virtue”. And while he “hopes Christ is right”, he finds himself ultimately unable to agree: “Suffering is suffering. Suffering is not virtue, nor does it make virtue, nor does of it virtue necessarily flow.”
Nation-building aside, the question of whether the novel’s legacy will benefit from the screen adaptation is, for me, a question of fidelity. To put it bluntly, the series is going to have to veer away from the source text by developing the post-internment section quite considerably if it is to succeed, for this is where the novel runs into its most serious problems.
Determined not to tie things off too neatly (because, in case you weren’t aware, life is not always neat), Flanagan delays, obfuscates and subverts the plot with an ever more implausible series of twists and turns. This reaches its apotheosis (or nadir) in the scene where Dorrigo’s wife and two children take shelter from a raging bushfire inside an old shed, only to discover that its precarious shelves are lined with “bottles of brushes in mineral turps and methylated spirits”. Cue ad-break.
Glitzier things
The Narrow Road to the Deep North was lambasted in the London Review of Books by poet, critic and translator Michael Hofmann, who said it was “all bite, and no chew”. He ridiculed the “quantity of expensive set-piece or special effect scenes on offer” (almost all of which take place in its final act). “Nothing that won’t fit onto a screen” was his pithy summation of the book’s contents. It will be interesting to see whether he gets a producer credit for the forthcoming series, or at very least a finder’s fee.
The lambasting didn’t stop there either. The philosopher A.C. Grayling, chair of the 2014 Man Booker Prize judging panel, fired back at Hofmann, accusing him of having written the review on a “bad haemorrhoid day”. Hofmann certainly wasn’t going to take that sitting down: he averred that Grayling was in fact the one with the haemorrhoids. (And people accuse academics of locking themselves away in their ivory towers.)
Overwhelmingly, however, other critics were kinder – effusive even. With more than a few praising the very attribute Hofmann derided. The novel was admired for its “huge”, “ambitious”, “multi-stranded” scope (all of those descriptors are taken from a single sentence in Morag Fraser’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald).
One presumes these are the kinds of adjectives producers look for when scouring the literary pages for their latest adaptation project. For with them come the promise of exotic employment opportunities and awards for cinematography. No such luck for the novelist who sets the whole train in motion, though. For this lonely figure, it’s back to his writing desk to watch the fanfare from a flannelette-pyjamaed distance like the rest of us.
As Flanagan put it in his Booker Prize acceptance speech, the writer must accept that his fate “is to be defeated by ever greater things”. Or, in the case of television, ever glitzier things.
Luke Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
