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The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

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The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

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Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
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About This Item

London: Chatto & Windus, 2013. First Edition . First UK Edition/First Printing with the complete number line on the copyright page including "1". Signed by the author on the title page and the author has included some words from the book relating to the title. The UK first edition of this Booker prizewinner with a meaningful inscription.

Synopsis

RICHARD FLANAGAN is the author of five previous novels,  Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist,  and  Wanting . He lives in Tasmania.

Reviews

On Feb 23 2017, CloggieDownunder said:
4.5 stars

"There was around him an exhausted emptiness, an impenetrable void cloaked this most famously collegial man, as if he already lived in another place – forever unravelling and refurling a limitless dream or an unceasing nightmare, it was hard to know – from which he would never escape. He was a lighthouse whose light could not be relit"

The Narrow Road to The Deep North is the sixth novel by award-winning Australian author, Richard Flanagan. Despite his humble beginnings in a remote Tasmanian village filled with "verandah-browed wooden cottages", Dorrigo Evans is clever enough to get scholarships for high school and university. He leaves the locale where he used to "smell the damp bark and drying leaves and watch clans of green and red musk lorikeets chortling far above. He would drink in the birdsong of the wrens and the honeyeaters, the whipcrack call of the jo-wittys…"

By 1940, he is a promising young surgeon, engaged to Ella Lansbury, a girl from the right sort of family, when he joins the army. Stationed near Adelaide while awaiting dispatch overseas, Dorrigo's chance encounter with his Uncle Keith's young second wife, Any Mulvaney, results in a liaison he could neither have anticipated nor resisted.

A few years on, Dorrigo Evans is a Prisoner of War, in command of a thousand men charged with building the Burma Railway, where cruelty and death were unwelcome, but commonplace: "They had smoked to keep the dead out of their nostrils, they had joked to keep the dead from preying on their minds, they had eaten to remind themselves they were alive…"

Dorrigo is constantly wracked with feelings of inadequacy, but "He could do this, he told himself… He had no belief he could do it, but others believed he could do it. And if he believed in them believing in him, maybe he could hold onto himself"

The survivors return home to a life that feels alien: "He didn't fit with his own life anymore, his own life was breaking down, and all that did fit – his job, his family – seemed to be coming apart". Dorrigo goes through the motions, marries, has three children and "Occasionally, he felt something within him angry and defiant, but he was weary in a way he had never known, and it seemed far easier to allow his life to be arranged by a much broader general will than by his own individual, irrational and no doubt misplaced terrors"

A celebrated surgeon and a war hero, Dorrigo despises the society of which he is part: "He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause". From those who have been there, he sometimes hears words of wisdom: "Adversity brings out the best in us, the podgy War Graves Commission officer sitting next to him had said… It's the everyday living that does us in"

Using multiple narrators, Flanagan examines the well-known cruelty of the Japanese captors from both sides. He also exposes the staggeringly selfish attitudes of POW officers, the sometimes secretive, sometimes selfish and sometimes extraordinarily generous behaviour of enlisted men, and also the postwar politics of punishment. With descriptive prose that is exquisite, it is no wonder that this novel is a winner of several awards and a nominee for many more. Profoundly moving.

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Details

Bookseller
MDS Books CA (CA)
Bookseller's Inventory #
000961
Title
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Author
Richard Flanagan
Book Condition
Used
Quantity Available
1
Edition
First Edition
Publisher
Chatto & Windus
Place of Publication
London
Date Published
2013

Terms of Sale

MDS Books

30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.

About the Seller

MDS Books

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2013
Mississauga, Ontario

About MDS Books

Modern First Editions, Fiction, Poetry.

Glossary

Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

Title Page
A page at the front of a book which may contain the title of the book, any subtitles, the authors, contributors, editors, the...
Number Line
A series of numbers appearing on the copyright page of a book, where the lowest number generally indicates the printing of that...
First Edition
In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
Copyright page
The page in a book that describes the lineage of that book, typically including the book's author, publisher, date of...

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