In love and war

How Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel became an acclaimed television series by one of Australia's fiercest film-makers.

- BY RUSSELL BAILLIE

The films of Australian director Justin Kurzel have often been grim, violent portraits of male brutality. His 2011 debut, Snowtown, was about the 1990s South Australian serial murders identified with the titular town, while 2021's Nitram was inspired by the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania.

On a happier note, he also put on screen the most notorious Aussie criminal of them all - Ned Kelly - in a film adaptation of Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning The True History of the Kelly Gang. The book gave Kurzel the opportunity to rework the Aussie Robin Hood mythology of the iron-clad bushranger in a mad, punk-rock kind of way.

Now, having committed one great Booker-winning Australian novel to the screen, Kurzel has delivered another with Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's also another quintessential slab of historical Oz-lit. And it's one that gives rising Australian star Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, Saltburn, Priscilla) his first major screen role at home. More on him later.

Tasmanian novelist Flanagan was inspired by his own father's experience as a Japanese prisoner of war, and his book won the Man Booker Prize in 2014. Mostly, his story followed the fictitious character of Dorrigo Evans, a medical officer among the Australian POWs working and dying on the Burma “death railway”. It was told in three interwoven timelines - one about Dorrigo's summer affair with his uncle's young wife Amy before shipping out; his capture after the fall of Singapore leading to his hellish internment; the venerated senior surgeon and national figure looking back at it all 40 or so years later.