May 29, 2023

#34 🇦🇺🛤️ The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

1 hour

About the Episode

You don’t always need a plane ticket to travel; sometimes, all you need is a book. Often, fictional stories can help us explore worlds outside our own, take us out of life’s everyday tangles, and allow us to widen our perspective. Fifth stop, Oceania! We hope you enjoy this discussion about 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' by Richard Flanagan.

About the Book

🦘 Welcome to Australia. This week we read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a book about war’s cruelties as well as the impossibility of love. The novel follows a single day in the life of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor working as a slave in a Japanese labor camp in 1943. The novel jumps around in time and setting, journeying from Tokyo to the Burma railway, from the caves of Tasmania to a pre-war beachside hotel, ultimately providing the reader a view into just how challenging it can be to find meaning and love after an intense war experience.

In this episode Dan and I discuss memory, time, the dual nature of man, art, eastern vs western culture, ethnocentrism, and the challenge of love. It’s a dark, intense, poetically written book and a great stop for the Australia episode of this season.

About Good Scribes Only

Hosted by novelists and entrepreneurs Daniel Breyer & Jeremy Streich, Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. Sometimes even traveling to a place doesn't permit you to see it for how it really is for those who live there. Fiction, on the other hand, can. And thus, season 3 is about widening our perspective. We hope you're coming along can help do the same. Be sure to check out the Episode Cheat Sheet for an overview.

We hope you enjoy this discussion about The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Episode Cheat Sheet

Episode Notes:

0-5 min — Squirrel gate!

5-10 min — Book introduction

10-15 min — Casting the movie

15-22 min — Plot summary

22-25 min — Novel’s structure

25-30 min — On memory

30-35 min — Post-war treatment of enemies

35-40 min — Dorrigo’s affair

40-45 min — Dorrigo’s struggles