The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Published 2014 · 464 pages · 121,422 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, War Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Narrow Road to the Deep North to read?
The Narrow Road to the Deep North scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Flanagan's prose is lyrical but accessible, with Tasmanian bush slang, army jargon and Japanese loanwords like Speedo and Philopon. It is richer than The Great Gatsby in its lists of flora, disease and camp life, but far plainer than Ulysses.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Long cumulative sentences pile up clauses in the camp and sea passages, while bare dialogue without quotation marks keeps most scenes clean. Its range is wider than The Remains of the Day but gentler than Faulkner.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Dorrigo's meditations on love, virtue and the circle versus the line sit inside very concrete scenes of mud, hunger and sex. It is more philosophical than Gatsby yet grounded like The Road.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Historical detail on the railway, medical conditions, Japanese military ideology and Tasmanian life keeps each section packed. Many named minor characters add to the load, though the story flows.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- The novel withholds Darky's beating and the letter Dorrigo receives, and shifts across time so readers must infer causes. Chapters often end on a gesture rather than an explanation.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- Camellia, circle versus line, dust motes, the dirty sky and haiku recur and accumulate meaning, much as in Gatsby but with more motifs. Lines from Tennyson and Basho echo throughout.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Flanagan lets Nakamura and Kota's poetic sensitivity sit beside their brutality, and treats Dorrigo's hero status with sardonic distance. The irony is pointed but lacks Nabokov's unreliable narration.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Hints of loss and an unseen letter hang over the early sections, and the novel ends in memory and doubt rather than neat closure. The affair's outcome stays uncertain and Dorrigo's fame never answers his guilt.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Numbered fragments move between 1914, 1940, 1943 and the 1990s, and the point of view shifts from Dorrigo to Amy, Nakamura, Kota and Darky. It is more fragmented than Anna Karenina but less radical than Flights.
How The Narrow Road to the Deep North is regarded
The Narrow Road to the Deep North holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Dublin Literary Award 2015, shortlist
- Booker Prize 2014, winner
Where the story of The Narrow Road to the Deep North takes place
- Australia and the Thai-Burma Railway, 1942 to 1943, the main setting