The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A paean to Australia's sons and daughters

CHOGO
朝伍
Died on the third day of the ninth month, 1806
at the age of forty-five

I long for people—
Hito koishi
then again I loathe them:
hito mutsukashishi
end of autumn.
aki no kure

— Japanese death poem

WARNING: SPOILERS

Netflix recently came out with streaming adaptations of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. And just as both are bold and fitting cultural projections of Italy and Colombia, so Amazon’s adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is an excellent choice for Australia.

I read the book when it first came out, and its searing account of the Japanese death camps on the Thai-Burma Railway haunted me. The show is an artistic accomplishment of a different kind — a total aesthetic victory. Its sombre palette matches Flanagan’s ruminative style. Its orchestral strings are the sound of remembering, of mourning. Its tempo trembles with a slow and steady horror beneath the surface.

(Wife says I'm a sucker for any show with a guy looking out into the distance with some sad music and by God she's right. Make it Ciarán Hinds (of Rome and The Terror fame) in a gorgeous multi-story dark timber harbour home awash with Australian birdsong and ‘pensive string music’ and I'm all in.)

It’s pleasing to see Narrow Road made into one of the best pieces of Australian television, unafraid and unapologetic and ambitious in its scope. It presses your face into the gruesome shame of watching a mate get beaten to death. You taste the thrill of illicit love.

More than anything, the show is a paean to Australia’s powerful sons and daughters: the seed of Albion transplanted to the antipodes, grown tall and beautiful. To its boys who answered the call to fight and bleed and die for it. Free men with irreverent spirits and sparks in their eyes yoked through mud and malarial jungle and dysentery to build foreign imperial delusions. Louts reduced to half-corpses under the heel of foreign conquerors. Their women widowed, waiting, or hardened by their return.

Our hero Dorrigo Evans towers above them all (he’s almost two metres tall). The show adores him. Sad, elegant eyes; a Roman chin; a scruff of dark hair. The camera hovers over him as he makes love to his wife-to-be, a young man’s shoulders and arms rippling with life. Her golden hair and Celtic-blue eyes flashing Australian dreams. Narrow Road showcases its tallest poppies: broad-shouldered sons, its daughters fair and lithe. He is the unlikely warrior-poet of working class Tasmania, a stand-in for Flanagan himself. She’s a Melbourne blue-blood, born to Australia’s gentle squatter aristocracy. Flanagan can’t help but jab at the rich, lonely in their palaces, unread. His working class hero stalks their halls with Greek poets in hand.

Yet Dorrigo is no mere poet. He is a surgeon, a warrior-god. He has the power to give and to take life. He tends to the men with barely more than his bare hands in the camp’s makeshift field hospital. He handpicks the men forced to march to their death in another brutal, futile spasm of Japanese command. Back in Australia, he takes whatever woman he wants, a god swooping down from on high, leaving wreckage in his wake. They suffer him as they must. He is Ganymede-beautiful, radiant and unreachable. He is Cronos, castrating his uncle by seducing his young bride for himself, catalysing both their ruin.

Children do not exist in this world. Not in the jungles, not in memory, not in the surgeon’s tent. If they’re present, they are invisible. The dead bear no children. The gods are lascivious but unfecund. The living drift like ghosts, inured to hope.

The mini-series takes the shape of memory: non-linear, recursive, haunted. The present interwoven with the past, the old robbed of their youth, the young devoured by the present. Young men ravage their wives while old men lie on their backs, taken by theirs. Young men sweat and strain, gorgeous and vital. Their women are hopeful, excusing their lovers’ foibles. Thick old men slump under hot showers, their women disillusioned and hardened by them.

In his older age Dorrigo’s hardened wife calls him the loneliest man she’s ever known. And he is lonely. A lonely intellectual. A surgeon, excused from hard labour in the death camp as he cares for the sick, he sits alone god-like, an angel in hell, outside the camp’s death grind. His men offer him tribute. Yet he is never alone. The entire show is soaked in the dark melancholy of the remembered. Everywhere stalk him the ghosts and nightmares of his past. When his mistress deserts him, scared off by his nighttime mutterings, he doesn't bat an eye. The flesh of a woman is not enough to warm his nights. He sleeps with the dead.

This world revolves around the horrors borne by men at war. But it is the women who build and nurture. Dorrigo’s scorned rich-girl wife is no dilettante — she builds his empire around him. One of the Japanese overlords tells Dorrigo his wife calls him a lucky man. Lucky to have her and his son. The men of this world are forsaken in their torment and their judgement. What light they feel, what life they nurture, what fortune they’re favoured with, comes from their women. Flanagan’s dark worlds always leave room for dark corners with verve and sultry possibility. Flanagan lives for the curve of a woman's back. He's the guy in The English Patient whose ideal companion is silent for nine hours of travel to Faya until the end he points at the horizon and says 'Faya' — yet burns and flames out in total love.

Narrow Road is unapologetic about Australia's rugged masculinity, its blood sacrifice, the West’s righteousness and her bloody retribution wreaked on the people of Japan. “Our enemies were more monsters than men,” Dorrigo tells a young journalist. “Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Are those not monstrous acts?” she asks our now wizened protagonist. “Believe me, young lady, you have no comprehension of war.” “Because I'm a woman?” “No, because you weren't there.” The gods need not explain themselves to too-smart and smarmy know-nothing journalists.

Flanagan’s working class don’t aspire to more, and so the case in Narrow Road. But the Australia of (same director Justin Kurzel’s) Snowtown’s hellish underclass is nowhere to be seen. The degeneracy of that grim world is replaced here by an aspirational reverie of the young and the beautiful, the brilliant and the strong, the glitzy and the salt of the earth. In Snowtown, the cigarette is the companion of the derro. Here, it hangs sultry from every lip.

The show is almost unAustralian in its pretentions (Les Murray called the book pretentious and stupid). There is no irony, no cheek to take the edge off. Nor does the show merely languish in the grisly horror that Australia seems to specialise. It might be somehow unAustralian to haul around Greek poets, but so be it. The show is proud of its hero-sons and steely-eyed daughters. It delights in its gorgeous coast and endless paddocks. This is not the sun-kissed land of rollicking laughs. It’s the salt-encrusted coast beneath darkened skies, and no less stunning for it. Narrow Road is unafraid to take itself seriously. It’s optimistic that it’s been made. Australia can reach for great, serious art too.

At the heart of Flanagan’s meditation on suffering and love and horror is a deep nihilism. These just are, there is no why. There is no meaning in the horrors those boys bore at the Death Railway. No meaning in the justice meted out to the perpetrators. No meaning in the hundreds of thousands of incinerated Japanese civilians. No meaning in the lover’s embrace. No meaning in a loveless marriage or a husband’s philandering. No meaning in the final moment of a great surgeon’s life, a warrior-poet who survived a war, sprawled bloody across a road, smeared by a random final twist of fate. There is no system of cosmic accounting that evens it all out. You just grin and bear it until you die.