The Narrow Road to the Deep North review – Richard Flanagan's powerful second world war novel. Flanagan's ambitious novel inspired by the Australian PoWs forced by the Japanese to work on the Burma Railway is both complex and masterful... Flanagan is a fine writer (if we can forgive him the script of Baz Luhrmann's execrable Australia), and through the voices of a broad cast of characters, he takes us deep into the secret heart of the war. Dorrigo Evans's life provides the framework – from a Tasmanian childhood (including a sublime description of his first football game), through a torrid affair with his uncle's wife (where Flanagan makes a strong case for Bad Sex award recognition), to the war and its aftermath. The book is far more ambitious than the charting of one man's struggle, however. It demands of its reader huge leaps of sympathetic imagination, shifting perspective between the Australians and their Japanese captors, allowing each a measure of redemptive humanity...