‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is a powerful yet flawed novel of wartime experience

DVA Australia

Australian and British POWs lay track on the Burma-Thailand railway in 1943.

Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North makes The Bridge on the River Kwai look like a jaunty walk in the park.

After the fall of Shanghai in 1943, 9,000 Australians became Japanese prisoners of war, including Flanagan’s own father. They, along with other Allied POWs and impressed Asian laborers, were forced to cut through the jungle with nothing more than hand tools and build a railroad line between Thailand and Burma.

The line became known as the “Death Railway” and, all told, nearly 100,000 men died in the process. They were starved, beaten, riddled with diseases, including cholera, near naked (most dressed only in filthy