Australian author Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is an ambitious account of his father’s POW status with the Japanese captors in World War II. Almost certainly, there is a blinding light of brilliance in the copious prose of the story. Amid WWII, in 1943, a group of Australian POW (prisoner of war) captives was captured by Japanese soldiers and made to labor away in the deep jungles of Java, to what purpose? To build the Thailand-Burma railroad or “Death Railway” from Bangkok to Rangoon slashing through the Burmese jungle. With no food or water for these dying captives, starvation and heinous deceases takes over them completely.

Two characters particularly stand out and I kept thinking about them throughout my reading of the book: Amy, Ella, and especially, Darky Gardiner (author’s father) in terms of their emotional quotient to the entire heart-touching story. Darky Gardiner’s death in the jungle was impossible to believe and difficult to accept! The circumstances under which he dies shocked me. For the doctor, Dorrigo Evans, returning to Amy was a foregone conclusion, and Ella, goodness poor Ella!

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