A warning, before we begin: this adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning book is not for the faint of heart.
In the first ten minutes, a man steps on a landmine and dies in the protagonist’s arms. In the rest of the series, we’re plunged into the living hell of the Burmese jungle, where Australian prisoners of war (among many others) labour under the eyes of their Japanese captors to build the infamous ‘railway of death’.
In other words, if you tuned in just to see Jacob Elordi, you might get more than you bargained for. Though he is good. Very, in fact. He plays Dorrigo Evans, a medical doctor in the Second World War who is captured along with his platoon after the Battle of Java.
Elordi’s Dorrigo is stoic, caring and prone to a brooding smoulder, but as we soon find out, he’s more complicated than that. The show flits between three timelines: pre-war, Burma, and the present day (more or less), where he’s played by Belfast actor Ciarán Hinds with haunted, massive eyes and a bullish manner.
Present-day Dorrigo is a venerated Australian surgeon who harbours a deep resentment of the Japanese and overlooks his long-suffering wife Ella (Olivia DeJonge, played later by Heather Mitchell) in favour of sleeping with his colleagues’ wives. He spends much of the series attempting to reckon with the destruction the war wrought on his psyche – as well as the destruction he’s wreaking on the people around him in turn. “I waited for you,” Ella tells him in one of the show’s most crushingly poignant moments. She did; she’s still paying for it.
Past Dorrigo, meanwhile, is a handsome doctor whose stay with his uncle Keith (Simon Baker) takes a wrong turn when he begins an affair with Keith’s younger wife Amy (Odessa Young), despite already being engaged to Ella (“what’s mine is yours, Dorrigo,” Keith tells him at the start – a tad too on the nose). These narratives intertwine in a double helix, flitting through the decades to create a lean and muscular piece of television.
Throughout, director Justin Kurzel shies away from thinking of war in binaries. Dorrigo’s angry rebuttals to a young journalist’s attempts to get him to see the Japanese as anything other than “monsters” is understandable, but Narrow Road doesn’t place blame, seeking instead to unearth why people commit terrible crimes in the name of patriotism.
It also doesn’t venerate war in the way that many war flicks can be wont to do. There’s no glory here, only desperate tragedy. When the Australian soldiers (whose cheerful camaraderie is chipped away at over the course of the episodes) first arrive at their jungle camps, they’re confronted with the sight of wooden posts stretching off into the forest like the road to hell, marking the track they’re about to build.
As things progress, a miasma of dread settles over everything – dread of what’s to come, informed by what has already happened – punctuated by flashes of joy and humanity, often from Dorrigo’s doomed fellows, whom he repeatedly tries and fails to save.
If this series has a flaw, it’s the unflinching way in which the camera’s gaze lingers on the atrocities being committed. No coy cut-aways here: we get decapitations, starvation, intense depictions of surgery. At the start of episode three, a soldier has his leg amputated, which – in the middle of the jungle – goes about as well as you would expect.
Watching blood spurt out of his leg in time with his rattling gasps is gorge-rising, gory stuff, after which I had to turn off the TV and wait for my stomach to settle. But that’s the point of it – Deep North is about the terrible things that people do to each other, and the difficulty of maintaining one’s humanity in a world that feels devoid of it.
It’s a message that feels worryingly contemporary. Here’s hoping that the lessons it teaches are ones we still want to learn.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
