Latest news with #RichardFlanagan
The National
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Fame makes you feel like an impostor, says Jacob Elordi
Fame can eat you alive if you let it. That is one of the lessons of the acclaimed new series Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's a lesson its star, Jacob Elordi, has had to learn the hard way. 'You feel like an impostor,' Elordi tells The National. 'You're met with this public idea of who you are, and it's never going to reflect who you actually are. 'Playing this role taught me that it's better to talk about it than bury it down for the entirety of your life.' The Australian actor, 27, has grappled with a lot in his rise to superstardom. He rocketed to fame in 2018 Netflix hit The Kissing Booth, following that up a year later with the phenomenal HBO series Euphoria. By the time Saltburn hit Amazon Prime Video in 2023, he was seemingly all anyone could talk about. The world saw his talent, to be sure, but things also got weird. He wasn't being treated as a great actor – only as a heart-throb. Increasingly, it seemed that fans and journalists alike couldn't separate him from the image built by his films and series. Perhaps that's why he saw so much of himself in Dorrigo Evans, the lead character of Narrow Road to the Deep North, now streaming on Tod and airing on BeIN TV channels in the Middle East. Dorrigo, just as he was in the Booker Prize-winning Richard Flanagan novel on which the series is based, is stoic – tormented by the divide between his public perception as a war hero and his true self that he keeps hidden inside. 'I felt it in my bones when I first read the book. He felt like a culmination of myself,' says Elordi. But unlike Dorrigo, Elordi isn't going to let the world tell him who he is. He's an actor – and a serious one at that. And while films such as Priscilla gave a hint at what's to come, Narrow Road is the start of his intentional ascent to being one of the best actors of his generation. 'I've grown up as a man of movies, and I really wouldn't have it any other way. I love movies so much,' says Elordi. Narrow Road is also a homecoming. It's his first Australian lead role since moving to Los Angeles in 2017 to pursue his acting career. That's part of why he takes the role so personally. It's not just himself he sees in the character – it's the world he left behind. 'There's this unspoken Australian thing I recognised here. There's so much of my dad in Dorrigo – this stoic Australian man – and all the men I grew up with. It's hard to put it into words – it's just something that's in our bones when you're born here,' Elordi says. When series director and co-creator Justin Kurtzel (Snowtown, The Order) approached Elordi for the role, he wasn't exactly sure what Elordi was about. He knew he was talented, but he had no idea how much Elordi cared about his craft – and cared about his homeland. Kurtzel says: 'In our first conversation, we talked a lot about Australia and being back here, and our love of Australian film. 'I was really impressed with his curiosity. He just felt like a serious actor who was deeply interested in the craft. He came at everything from that perspective rather than another one,' Kurtzel continues. The more you get to know Elordi, the more you find he is truly a student of the game. He's an avid subscriber to the Criterion Channel – a streaming service dedicated to classic and contemporary arthouse cinema – and calls the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman 'the greatest actor of all time'. In addition to reading the novel over and over, Elordi did a lot of digging into the history of film to prep for Narrow Road. In the series, his character is captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Burma railway, leading him to revisit classics that tread similar terrain. 'There's so much cinema. There's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and Bridge Over the River Kwai. There's a lot of great collections on Criterion, too – particularly pre- and post-World War Two Japanese cinema. There's a tonne of poetry and a great book called Behind Bamboo too – it may not be popular media, but this was all really helpful to me,' says Elordi. For Kurtzel, much of filming Narrow Road was about getting out of the way and letting the performances of Elordi and his co-stars dominate. 'We wanted it to feel alive,' says Kurtzel. 'We shot hand-held for very, very long takes, and it was to try to make the actors feel as though they were kings on set, and we were just there to follow them. A lot of the energy of the show came from what they were giving us.' And when Elordi returned to Hollywood afterwards, he did so as a changed man. He deactivated his Instagram in November 2024 with more than 13 million followers – seemingly unthinkable in an era in which social media fame dictates someone's perceived value to film executives – and he's chugging headfirst into the next era of his career. Without the distractions that come with managing his public persona, Elordi is thriving. He'll star as Frankenstein's Monster in Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and Hig in Ridley Scott's upcoming The Dog Stars, based on the bestselling novel. 'Now I have the freedom to make them on a regular basis and hopefully make good ones,' says Elordi. 'It's a dream come true.' BeIN Media Group is the rights holder of Narrow Road to the Deep North in the Mena region
The National
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Jacob Elordi: 'Fame makes you feel like an impostor'
Fame can eat you alive if you let it. That is one of the lessons of the acclaimed new series Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's a lesson its star, Jacob Elordi, has had to learn the hard way. 'You feel like an impostor,' Elordi tells The National. 'You're met with this public idea of who you are, and it's never going to reflect who you actually are. 'Playing this role taught me that it's better to talk about it than bury it down for the entirety of your life.' The Australian actor, 27, has grappled with a lot in his rise to superstardom. He rocketed to fame in 2018 Netflix hit The Kissing Booth, following that up a year later with the phenomenal HBO series Euphoria. By the time Saltburn hit Amazon Prime Video in 2023, he was seemingly all anyone could talk about. The world saw his talent, to be sure, but things also got weird. He wasn't being treated as a great actor – only as a heart-throb. Increasingly, it seemed that fans and journalists alike couldn't separate him from the image built by his films and series. Perhaps that's why he saw so much of himself in Dorrigo Evans, the lead character of Narrow Road to the Deep North, now streaming on Tod in the Middle East. Dorrigo, just as he was in the Booker Prize-winning Richard Flanagan novel on which the series is based, is stoic – tormented by the divide between his public perception as a war hero and his true self that he keeps hidden inside. 'I felt it in my bones when I first read the book. He felt like a culmination of myself,' says Elordi. But unlike Dorrigo, Elordi isn't going to let the world tell him who he is. He's an actor – and a serious one at that. And while films such as Priscilla gave a hint at what's to come, Narrow Road is the start of his intentional ascent to being one of the best actors of his generation. 'I've grown up as a man of movies, and I really wouldn't have it any other way. I love movies so much,' says Elordi. Narrow Road also a homecoming. It's his first Australian lead role since moving to Los Angeles in 2017 to pursue his acting career. That's part of why he takes the role so personally. It's not just himself he sees in the character – it's the world he left behind. 'There's this unspoken Australian thing I recognised here. There's so much of my dad in Dorrigo – this stoic Australian man – and all the men I grew up with. It's hard to put it into words – it's just something that's in our bones when you're born here,' Elordi says. When series director and co-creator Justin Kurtzel (Snowtown, The Order) approached Elordi for the role, he wasn't exactly sure what Elordi was about. He knew he was talented, but he had no idea how much Elordi cared about his craft – and cared about his homeland. Kurtzel says: 'In our first conversation, we talked a lot about Australia and being back here, and our love of Australian film. 'I was really impressed with his curiosity. He just felt like a serious actor who was deeply interested in the craft. He came at everything from that perspective rather than another one,' Kurtzel continues. The more you get to know Elordi the more you find he is truly a student of the game. He's an avid subscriber to the Criterion Channel – a streaming service dedicated to classic and contemporary art house cinema – and calls the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman 'the greatest actor of all time'. In addition to reading the novel over and over, Elordi did a lot of digging into the history of film to prep for Narrow Road. In the series, his character is captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Burma railway – leading him to revisit classics that tread similar terrain. 'There's so much cinema. There's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and Bridge Over the River Kwai. There's a lot of great collections on Criterion, too – particularly pre and post-World War II Japanese cinema. There's a ton of poetry and a great book called Behind Bamboo too – it may not be popular media but this was all really, really helpful to me,' says Elordi. For Kurtzel, much of filming Narrow Road was about getting out of the way and letting the performances of Elordi and his co-stars dominate. 'We wanted it to feel alive,' says Kurtzel. 'We shot hand-held for very, very long takes, and it was to try to make the actors feel as though they were kings on set, and we were just there to follow them. A lot of the energy of the show came from what they were giving us.' And when Elordi returned to Hollywood afterwards, he did so as a changed man. He deactivated his Instagram in November 2024 with more than 13 million followers – seemingly unthinkable in an era in which social media fame dictates someone's perceived value to film executives – and he's chugging headfirst into the next era of his career. Without the distractions that come with managing his public persona, Elordi is thriving. He'll star as Frankenstein's Monster in Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and Hig in Ridley Scott's upcoming The Dog Stars, based on the bestselling novel. 'Now I have the freedom to make them on a regular basis and hopefully make good ones,' says Elordi. 'It's a dream come true.' Narrow Road to the Deep North is streaming on Tod in the Middle East
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
This month's best paperbacks: Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and more
Memoir Question 7 Richard Flanagan Fiction All Fours Miranda July Fiction Intermezzo Sally Rooney Memoir Knife Salman Rushdie Fiction Long Island Compromise Taffy Brodesser-Akner Politics Muslims Don't Matter Sayeeda Warsi Fiction Enlightenment Sarah Perry Fiction Karla's Choice Nick Harkaway Politics Autocracy, Inc. Anne Applebaum Fiction Midnight and Blue Ian Rankin Politics On Leadership Tony Blair History Revolusi David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay Memoir The author's finest work Question 7 Richard Flanagan The Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan's 12th book stands alone in its structure and its thread of thought as it bisects his oeuvre between the fictive and the factual. Question 7, which won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction last year - though the author suspended his acceptance of the prize money - is a brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence. Question 7 is Flanagan's finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware, the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn. In the meditative, circular story structure of memoir and history and auto-fiction, replete with nuance and sound thought, Flanagan doesn't just present Chekhov's Question 7 – appearing as a thread, he doesn't just pull at it but unravels an entire tapestry. He travels to the metaphorical weaver, the shearer, the shepherd, and the hooved animal itself – and reaches into the deepest past where, he is so astute in writing, 'there is no memory without shame'. Tara June Winch £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Larger than life All Fours Miranda July Miranda July's characters often wonder what is real and what's not. How far can our minds take us – dreaming, fantasising, making art – and when must we return to a shared reality? Recently July has turned these preoccupations to new uses, raising the stakes and developing something like an ethics of the misfit. Her casually magisterial 2020 film Kajllionaire looked outwards to society's edges. These grifters were all too plausibly products of Trump's America, even as the imagery tended towards surrealism. An overcommitment to fantasy in parallel with a total shaving off of dreams and tenderness: this became the stuff of survival, and life and death are at stake too in July's acerbically clever, radically compassionate new novel, All Fours. Here the 45-year-old narrator asks even more clamorously whether her life is real – which is unsurprising, given she's apparently the author of July's oeuvre. To tether herself to the present, she decides to take a road trip from LA to New York. But just outside LA she locks eyes across her windscreen with Davey, a gauche, handsome attendant at a smalltown garage. She squanders thousands of dollars commissioning Davey's wife Claire to exquisitely redesign the room she takes in an ugly hotel, and there she remains for three weeks, joined every afternoon by Davey himself, with whom she discovers an astonishing mutual but unconsummated passion. He turns out to be foremost an incandescent, preternaturally airborne dancer, and through dancing they find forms of intimacy that finally make life seem real. By tangling explicitly with reality across mediums she pushes autofiction to new limits, revealing how good this genre is at questioning reality. How can the narrator make her own peculiarities part of a lived life? How can she get real in the face of death if what remains most real is art? Lara Feigel £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Surprise moves in love, loss and chess Intermezzo Sally Rooney If any few pages of Sally Rooney's fourth novel blew through the streets on an autumn wind, many a chance reader would be sure who wrote them. They'd recognise the sentences precision-engineered for weight distribution like wide-span bridges. They'd find moment-by-moment emotion, coolly itemised; monosyllabic dialogue occasionally breaking the surface while immense currents of introspection flow beneath; breathtakingly intimate and properly sexy sex, felt from the inside and piously revered as a moral force. Here again, in short order and at great length, are qualities familiar from Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). Intermezzo is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It's also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger. Two brothers have just lost their father; we're in the weeks of disorientation after the funeral. Ivan Koubek is 22, quietly cerebral, excelling as a competitive chess player and acutely aware of finding social interaction difficult. He's 'a complete oddball' according to Peter, but then Peter, a smooth-talking barrister who needs to be right, is getting a lot of things wrong. In steadily alternating chapters that carry on, left, right, while the protagonists lose and find their bearings, Ivan embarks on an ardent relationship that surprises all who know him, and sexually voracious Peter, 10 years older, negotiates his desire for two diametrically different women. Ivan's neurodiverse experience of the world, slowly and attentively rendered, yields its own forms of eloquence, his uncertain use of language contrasting with Peter's outward fluency, his silences busy with feeling, his mind and body alive with doubt and perception. As suppressed emotions veer sideways, we find Ivan in astonished rapture, and Peter's self‑satisfaction running close to nihilistic despair. It's intriguing to see Rooney, whose inheritance is more obviously from the celebrated 'scrupulous meanness' of Dubliners, involving herself so thoroughly with Ulysses. She remains very much her own writer in this relationship, achieving an effect quite different from Joyce, whose commodious notation of Bloom's roaming thoughts spins outward across languages, places, incongruous rhymes, his every line proposing games of association. Rooney's elliptical phrases show us perceptions bent uncomfortably out of shape. And all the while she honours her subjects with intent seriousness rather than with play. Tightening her focus on the immediate, she exerts a centripetal pressure. My instinct while reading is to throw open a window, look at a painting, anything to allay the claustrophobia induced by being kept so close to people absorbed exclusively by their feelings, right now this moment, for each other. But art does its job when it pulls us beyond our instincts to experience other ways of being. Intermezzo is itself about life as continuous experiment. The novel suggests that Rooney (at Peter's age, 33) won't be settling in the shapes she has established, but holding us, with mixed joy and unease, in strenuous irresolution. Alexandra Harris £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Memoir A story of hatred defeated by love Knife Salman Rushdie A couple of nights before he was almost killed by a stranger with a knife, Salman Rushdie dreamed about being attacked by a Roman gladiator with a spear. He'd had similar dreams ever since Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa following publication of The Satanic Verses, back in 1989, imagining 'my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me'. When on the morning of 12 August 2022, in Chautauqua in upstate New York, on stage to talk about (of all things) the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, he saw a figure in black rushing towards him, his first thought was 'So it's you. Here you are', and his second, more bemused, was 'Really? It's been so long. Why now, after all these years?' This is 'a book I'd much rather not have needed to write,' he says, composed with 'one eye and one and a half hands'. But he uses it to 'own' what happened. As well as documenting his ordeal, it ranges widely, from thoughts about other writers who were victims of knife crime (Samuel Beckett, Naguib Mahfouz: 'What was this, a club?'), to memories of childhood and his abusive, alcoholic father, to reflections on violence and on the deaths and illnesses of friends. There's also a chapter in which he conducts four imaginary interviews with his attacker, who has described Rushdie as 'disingenuous'. Does every disingenuous person deserve to die, Rushdie asks him. The replies are surly: 'You don't know me, you'll never know me,' the A says. But we learn about his nocturnal gaming, his angry 'Incel' loneliness, and a life-changing trip to Lebanon. At one point he quotes Martin Amis: 'When you publish a book, you either get away with it, or you don't.' He has more than got away with this one. It's scary but heartwarming, a story of hatred defeated by love. Blake Morrison £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Trials of the wealthy Long Island Compromise Taffy Brodesser-Akner 'Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?' The first line of Long Island Compromise sets the tone: a self-aware narrator commanding our attention. It's an instant connection, which shouldn't be a surprise because this is New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose intelligent and supremely engaging debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, was an international hit and became a Disney+ TV series. Second books can be fatal, of course, and clearly Brodesser-Akner has decided to go big with a novel about that curse of contemporary America – serious wealth. Apple TV+ has already bought the rights. The story kicks off in 1980 with a kidnapping. Super-rich polystyrene foam factory owner Carl Fletcher is swiped from the driveway of his enormous Long Island waterfront home, where his pregnant wife, Ruth, is giving their two sons, Nathan, eight, and 'Beamer', six, bowls of cereal. It is a brilliantly orchestrated opening, 30 pages of calmly narrated shock, chaos and panic – the $250,000 demand, the FBI, the media, the reaction of the wider community, women in avocado- and mustard-coloured kitchens gossiping down phone lines. Pregnant Ruth, sobbing hysterically, ends up dropping the ransom money in an airport bin, accompanied – unfathomably – by little Beamer, the child frozen in terror. Carl is returned battered and traumatised. He'll never recover. The rest of the novel documents the shattering emotional fallout. One of the more interesting subplots traces the story the grandfather told of how he managed to escape from Poland to America. Slowly, it emerges the story is based on a lie, a terrible act which somehow defines them all. As an evisceration of extreme wealth, this novel makes a bold and relevant point, and yet, without redemptive qualities – softness, hope, empathy – it can feel relentless. It is fun to condemn, but hard to care. Lucy Atkins £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Politics A stinging rebuke to former colleagues Muslims Don't Matter Sayeeda Warsi Prejudices can always be rationalised: racial segregation is upheld as natural. Complaints about sexism get dismissed as emotional outbursts. Muslims encounter a particular version of this: according to hostile politicians and journalists, anger against them is their own fault. Being frightened of their faith is normal – and 'Islamophobia' is just a fancy word, invented to shield extremists from criticism. Only the most twitchy Muslim-baiter would call Sayeeda Warsi, former Conservative party chair, an extremist. Since resigning from David Cameron's cabinet in 2014 over its 'morally indefensible' policies towards Palestine, she has also campaigned against antisemitism and the persecution of Christians, earning death threats from Islamic State in the process. 'It's time to stop comparing the worst of one community to the best of another,' she writes. She's actually been arguing that point since her Sternberg lecture in 2011, when she said that disdain for Islam was becoming so routine it passed 'the dinner-table test'. Warsi doesn't spare her former colleagues. Her account, measured but forceful, claims that Tory ministers systematically marginalised Muslim concerns, undermining human rights that should be universal. Slights and smears were commonplace, she writes, and successive administrations often preferred to engage with pliant puppets, rather than credible community leaders. Zealots like Michael Gove barely acknowledged complaints of bias, treating them as distractions or delusions. Misogyny among Muslims was deplored, but women weren't offered assistance. Though Suella Braverman and colleagues talked up the involvement of British Pakistanis in paedophile grooming gangs, when it came to Shamima Begum, a British teenager groomed by IS, Sajid Javid removed the most basic legal protection of all: her citizenship. She hopes Labour will do better, by respecting a cross-party report about anti-Muslim hatred that Rishi Sunak ignored. It defines Islamophobia as a prejudice 'rooted in racism', which 'targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness'. That's contentious – if only because so much hostility has come from senior politicians who aren't white – but Warsi argues powerfully in its support. She is right to do so. Efforts to differentiate Islamophobia from racism are a quibble rather than a critique. Religion may not be the same as race, but that didn't stop respondents to a 2022 poll disliking Muslims more than any other social group except Gypsies and Irish Travellers. The man Theresa May appointed to lead the Home Office in 2018 has always stressed he's Muslim by birth only. That was irrelevant a year later, however, when her government organised a state banquet in honour of Donald Trump. Capitulating to the US president's bigotry, Downing Street declined to invite its own home secretary. Stung by the snub, Javid promptly bounced rivals in the contest to succeed May into saying they would support an inquiry into Tory Islamophobia. Warsi generously calls that 'a glimpse of the kind of politician he could have been'. Perhaps. But it's also evidence that you don't have to be a pious Muslim – or a principled one, for that matter – to be victimised for your presumed beliefs. Sadakat Kadri £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Cosmic strangeness Enlightenment Sarah Perry How do you quiet a warring soul? Every one of Sarah Perry's novels has grappled lavishly with this question. Fate v free will; doubt v certainty; science v God. The metaphysical battleground is Perry's literary terrain. She cannot seem to escape its gravitational pull, nor the estuarine mud of her home county. And so it seems only fitting that the Essex author's latest novel, Enlightenment, longlisted for the Booker prize, is a tale of orbits, collisions and other cosmic ellipses: inescapable loops. We begin in the winter of 1997 in the fictional riverside town of Aldleigh, a version of Chelmsford, where Perry grew up. This was a decisive year for Britain: the year of Tony Blair and the New Labour landslide, the handover of Hong Kong, and Princess Diana's funeral pageantry. But the only event that interests Perry is celestial: the blazing arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet. Our heroes are a gentleman stargazer, a master embroiderer and a wakeful ghost in a black satin gown. As the comet streaks towards perihelion, the apex of its loop around the sun, Thomas and Grace find themselves caught up in a century-old mystery: the 1887 disappearance of Maria Văduva, a Romanian comet hunter turned ornery ghost. They will spend the next three decades stumbling across clues – furtive letters, misplaced gravestones, a cryptic diary, a pearl-threaded dress – while Maria's 'black-browed' spirit berates them from the shadows. It's not the greatest of mystery plots – far too reliant on serendipity – but this is a book about the capriciousness of the stars. I was charmed by the book's cosmic strangeness, but bothered by its queer cliches. It's so wearying to confront yet another tale of exquisite, chaste gay loneliness. When a telescope is used for the first time – tilted up into the dark – what the astronomer sees that night is called 'First Light'. It's as if a new consciousness is born in that moment, a new eye opened. At her best, that's what Perry has managed to capture in Enlightenment. The joy of first light. Beejay Silcox £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Continuation of le Carré Karla's Choice Nick Harkaway They do it with James Bond, so why not with George Smiley? The estate of Ian Fleming has allowed many new 007 books to be written by luminaries such as William Boyd, Anthony Horowitz and even Jeffery Deaver, to keep the franchise (and, perhaps, its copyrights) alive. So why not try the same with John le Carré's great anti-Bond, the diffident, corpulent and brilliant spymaster of 'the Circus'? At least here the literary pedigree is unimpeachable: the novelist Nick Harkaway is also le Carré's son. Harkaway sets his story in a gap between canonical Smileys: after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (published in 1963) and before the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). (Smiley appears only in the background of The Looking-Glass War, 1965.) We are in 1963, to be precise, and the events recounted in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are still fresh in the characters' memories: they are all grieving for their colleague Alec Leamas, gunned down at the Berlin Wall. What a treat it turns out to be to wander anew the fusty, crumbling warren of the Circus (not the peculiar open-plan brutalism of the 2011 Tinker Tailor movie). The original gang is all here: Control, with his spectacles that always catch the light just so, in order to make the lenses seem opaque; the fast-talking Hungarian hard man Toby Esterhase; Bill Haydon, the old-school charmer who will shag anything that moves; Jim Prideaux, the soldier-poet scalp-hunter; Peter Guillam, the sorcerer's apprentice. They all act as aficionados would expect; the stentorian research queen Connie exclaims 'It's a song of sorrows, George'; while Harkaway has a lot of fun in particular with the speech patterns of Esterhase, who almost steals the show: 'My God, this fellow. He's making heavy weather, doesn't want to play … You think we just bust him right now? Disgraceful conduct from a so-called diplomat, hobnobbing with professional assassins, we are all shocked, tell us everything or it's persona non grata and no more Harrods.' Later, the reader is almost inclined to cheer when Esterhase explains, after a spot of fisticuffs: 'I like to fly the flag for rootless cosmopolitans when I can.' Le Carré once said that he didn't write as many Smiley novels as he had planned because it was too hard to get away from Alec Guinness's definitive portrayal in the classic 1970s TV adaptations. So at least we know we have the master's blessing. And a drop more of his narrative voice's caustic decency, expertly continued by Harkaway, would not go amiss in these times. 'We don't do justice, though, do we?' Peter Guillam remarks at one point. 'That's another department.' Steven Poole £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Politics The devil you know Autocracy, Inc. Anne Applebaum Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I'd seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism. That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin's invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China's ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm. Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless. I remember disagreeing with her genteelly at editorial meetings in the early 1990s, when she was writing about the danger that Russia's post-communist implosion would one day present for the west, after Boris Yeltsin left office. She talked even then about the need for Nato to build up its defences against the time when Russia would be resurgent; while I, having spent so much time in the economic devastation of Moscow and St Petersburg, thought the best way for the west to protect itself was by being far more generous and welcoming towards Russia. Events have shown which of us was right, and it wasn't me. John Simpson £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A welcome addition to a standout series Midnight and Blue Ian Rankin Most 'maverick' cops are – existential crises and addiction issues apart – mysteriously immune to the consequences of their actions. Not so John Rebus: Midnight and Blue, the 25th novel to feature bestseller Rankin's cantankerous protagonist finds him incarcerated in HMP Edinburgh for the attempted murder of his old enemy, Big Ger Cafferty. Despite his vulnerability as a former cop, an acute shortage of accommodation means that he is released from the Separation and Reintegration Unit into the general halls, with the dubious promise of protection from in-house drug baron Darryl Christie. When a fellow inmate is found stabbed to death in his cell, Rebus begins an unofficial inquiry. Meanwhile, his former colleague DI Siobhan Clarke investigates the disappearance of teenager Jasmine Andrews – an apparently unrelated case, until another murder provides a link, and it starts to look as if some of Police Scotland are just as culpable as those they've put away. An expertly plotted and very welcome addition to a standout series. Laura Wilson £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Politics Working to rule On Leadership Tony Blair Tony Blair's first book since 2010's A Journey is a fascinating treatise on leadership – though I suspect it will leave some of the cohort it is aimed at wishing he had delved deeper into his own experiences, turning a book of general interest into one of unique insight. Before I expand, some disclosure. The political enmity between Labour and the SNP is so deep that for me to have expressed the slightest admiration for the former prime minister while I was still in frontline politics would have been nigh-on impossible. It would have sparked outrage among my supporters – just as it would be political suicide for an aspiring Labour politician to say anything positive about me. Indeed, this is one of the problems of our tribal politics that he, rightly, rails against. However, now that I have stepped back from the frontline I can be more candid. While there is much that I disagree with Blair about – and on Iraq that disagreement is profound – I think history will, and should, judge him much more kindly than contemporary opinion does. Indeed, it is perhaps no accident that one part of the book that seems to come from a deeply personal place concerns the need for a leader to protect his or her legacy: 'facts are still facts. But the colour, the interpretation, the framing of motive and impact, these are judgments, and the judges need at least to hear both sides.' The best bits of the book – and they are genuinely very good – are the passages offering advice on how to cope with the personal burdens of leadership, from dealing with the pressures of social media, to developing a hinterland, avoiding hubris, and knowing when to leave the stage. There is much to learn from On Leadership, and I am glad Blair has written it. It will fascinate anyone interested in the art of governing, even in the abstract – and represents a good investment of time for anyone in or aspiring to political leadership. Indeed, I wish it had been available to me before I entered high office. Had he poured more of himself and his own experiences into it, though, and challenged his own thinking further, what is a good book might have been a truly great one. Nicola Sturgeon £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop History Indonesia's fight for freedom Revolusi David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay Indonesia: the world's largest island nation, 17,000 pieces of land projecting from the waves where Indian and Pacific oceans meet, ranging in scale from the giants of Sumatra, Java and Borneo, to the tiny volcanic outcrops of the Banda Sea. With 280 million people, this is the fourth most populous nation on Earth, after India, China and the US, and the largest Muslim-majority country. It's also one of the most overlooked, by western eyes at least. What proportion of anglophones could even place Jakarta on a map? Relating the story of this place is, then, a mammoth task, requiring a monumental research effort. This is what the Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck has achieved in his superb history, Revolusi. To set the scene: the first humans, hunter-gatherers, reached the archipelago 75,000 years ago. A long time later, around 2000BC, a new influx arrived: the so-called Austronesians, pre-history's greatest seafarers, who would spread across the oceans from Madagascar to Hawaii. Soon, thanks to their strategic location, the Indonesian islands were swept over by civilisations and religions from the north and west. From India came Brahminism and Hinduism; from China, Buddhism and Taoism. But it was Islam, which arrived around the 13th century, that would become the archipelago's dominant faith. Europeans knew the 'East Indies' through the magical flavours that grew there. Pepper, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon were brought west through Asian trading networks, and fetched incredible sums in Flemish markets. But it took Portuguese navigators centuries to find a route to the Indies themselves, via the Cape of Good Hope. In 1596, the first Dutch expedition reached Java, led by Cornelis de Houtman of Gouda, who returned with a valuable cargo of spices. Six years later, the Netherlands confederation created the Dutch East India Company, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC, and granted it a trading monopoly in the east. Much like the East India Company founded in Britain two years earlier, the VOC would take on the powers of a nation state, arranging treaties, building forts and raising armies. In 1619 the VOC established its headquarters at a sheltered bay on the north coast of Java, naming the settlement Batavia in homage to the ancestral tribe of the Dutch; we now know this place as Jakarta. The company's only purpose was to make money for its investors. As Van Reybrouck states, 'There was no way this could go well.' At least one politician in The Hague felt disgrace at his government's treatment of the islands it had lived off for so long. 'We are revealed to the world as tyrants and cheats,' the social democrat MP Jacques de Kadt wrote. 'That which could have been repaired in 1945 and could have led to the cooperation of two independent states … has been destroyed by provincial politicians of all the Dutch parties. What is left to us is this: realising what we missed and botched. What is left to us is shame at all our narrow-mindedness, incompetence, and conceit.' Charlie English £13.49 (RRP £14.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Reading the signs of crisis Gliff Ali Smith Ali Smith has never been afraid to take cleverness seriously. It is a distinctly European sensibility, yet its fullest vindication came amid the xenophobic pageantry of Brexit. The Seasonal Quartet was the work of an intellectual first responder, urgently cataloguing the treasures of pluralism as the body politic celebrated its sweaty fiesta of insularity. Not many novelists could have pulled that off. It's not as if that crisis has passed; it's just been subsumed by bigger ones, and Smith hasn't been standing idly by. Gliff is to be followed in 2025 by Glyph, a sister novel that will further explore 'how we make meanings and … are made meaningless'. As ever, Smith delights in sportive wordplay, but those obliquely iterating titles belie a frank clarity of purpose. The world is on fire, Ali Smith is here to tell us, and this emergency calls for some urgent semiotics. It helps that Smith's natural mode of discourse, in the best way, resembles the questing and venturesome learning strategies of children. In semiotics, a sign is said to be overdetermined when it must accommodate many meanings. Smith is alert to such abstruse points, as when one character objects to the idea that a passport proves she's her: 'We prove a passport's it.' But the cleverness she celebrates is innate and ordinary. It is human, in other words, and Gliff is the mark of just such a native genius. Paraic O'Donnell £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Nature Dwelling in nature Bothy Kat Hill Bothies are basic mountain huts for walkers in the Scottish Highlands, Welsh mountains and the English peaks. Usually they are old farm buildings or crofting cottages. Free and unbookable, if you're lucky they may offer a stove and a composting toilet, but often they comprise just a roof and four walls. As Kat Hill says in this history of the bothy, 'to those for whom the call of the outdoors is strong, few things are more appealing than a hut in the wild, removed from the stresses of modern life'. There are now some 100 bothies, cared for by a charitable organisation, the Mountain Bothies Association. In the last few years, bothies have provided Hill with 'a kind of shelter as I navigated the complicated path away from a life that was making me unhappy'. Dissatisfied with her career as an academic historian in London and dealing with the emotional fallout from a toxic relationship, Hill found that bothies 'gave me respite from more than the weather'. They also provided her with a subject, one that allowed her to explore the Anthropocene as an historian. For as well as describing the passionate and friendly community that use bothies, she also considers how we can engage with the love of wild places while not idealising them. Bothies are built in isolated locations, in landscapes shaped by humans over countless generations. Using twelve bothies, Hill expertly explores their history, highlighting how, despite their apparent wildness, issues such as climate change and species decline increasingly impinge on them. Each bothy provides visitors with a bothy book in which they can record their experiences, sometimes with sketches or poetry. The oldest are archived and they provide Hill with wonderfully touching expressions of people's feelings about landscapes and bothies, going back decades: 'as a historian, I love a document'. In August 1940, Charles Drinkwater stayed at Corrour bothy ('the most famous of bothies'), deep in the Cairngorms. On leave from the army, he wrote in the bothy book, 'I'm still hoping to be back here for several days when the war is over.' It's not known however if he survived to return. Rich with impressions of nature, this is an ambitious mix of memoir, history and environmental issues. In bothies and their visitors, Hill finds a superbly expressive embodiment of both her concerns about imperilled nature and our relationship with it. She concludes that bothiers have a strong sense of responsibility and care about 'place, people and environments', a feeling that goes beyond the present to include future generations. In their 'small acts of dwelling and care', she finds a hopeful symbol of a more sustainable and less exploitative way of living with nature, as well as a place where she and other visitors can be 'lulled to rest by wind or waves or wild sounds of the night'. PD Smith £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan audiobook review – a bold memoir of life and near-death
At the start of this boldly experimental memoir, the Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan visits the site of a Japanese labour camp where his late father was interned during the second world war and where he ends up awkwardly having his photo taken with a former guard, Mr Sato. The war ended weeks after the US launched an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 60,000 people in less than a minute. That bomb also led to Flanagan's father, then days from death, being freed, which in turn allowed him to father a child who would grow up to become a writer. 'How many people need to die in order that you might read this book?' Flanagan asks. Question 7, named after a riddle posed by Chekhov, is a book about the connections and choices that shape our lives, for better or worse. Flanagan is the narrator, his reading by turns mournful, reflective and quizzical as he plots a path through the lives of his parents, the writer HG Wells, Wells's sometime inamorata, Rebecca West, and the physicist Leo Szilard, who masterminded the nuclear chain reaction that was instrumental in the creation of the bomb. These historical vignettes are intertwined with Flanagan's own childhood memories of life in Tasmania, an island with a troubled history, and culminate in his account of a near-death experience at the age of 21, when his kayak became wedged underwater. As he assesses his own complex heritage and those of pivotal figures from the past, Flanagan reflects that 'there is no memory without shame'. Available via Penguin Audio, 7hr 47min FreeAmanda Knox, Headline, 10hr 17min Knox narrates her memoir detailing her struggles to adapt to a normal life after her wrongful imprisonment in Italy. Our EveningsAlan Hollinghurst, Picador, 16hr 36minThe Line of Beauty author's latest novel about the diverging lives of two public schoolboys is read by Prasanna Puwanarajah.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Bridge on the River Kwai: How Hollywood buried the grim truth of the Burma Death Railway
Australian drama series The Narrow Road to the Deep North, out now on Amazon Prime Video, takes viewers back to the horrors of the Thai-Burma Railway – the 'Death Railway'. Constructed under appalling conditions, it claimed the lives of 12,500 Allied POWs and more than 80,000 Asian workers. They carried out punishing labour while suffering from disease, malnutrition, and physical brutality from Japanese engineers and guards, and conscripted Korean guards. The series – based on the Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name by Richard Flanagan – tells the story of an Australian doctor, Dorrigo Evans (played by Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds in his younger and older years), his experiences as a POW on the Death Railway, and the continued impact on his life decades later. The construction of the railway was most famously depicted in The Bridge on the River Kwai, the 1957 classic starring Sir Alec Guinness. A blockbuster success, it won seven Academy Awards, including a Best Actor statue for Guinness. Despite a rocky relationship with director David Lean, Guinness admitted it was 'the best thing I've ever done'. But it's more Hollywood fantasy than historical fact. The British War Office was unhappy with the film – particularly for its depiction of British soldiers collaborating with Japanese captors – and it's been viewed as controversial among FEPOWs (Far East Prisoners of War) and their families. Guinness's character was based on POW officer Lieutenant Colonel Sir Philip Toosey, who initially enjoyed the film as a piece of storytelling. 'It was only when the prisoners started saying, 'Sir, it was a terrible slur on your leadership,' that he twigged the public had taken Hollywood for its word,' recalled Julie Summers, author, historian, and granddaughter of Toosey. The construction of the Death Railway was just one aspect of the Burma Campaign, in which the Allies fought the Japanese over the recovery of Burma. It was sometimes dubbed 'the forgotten war' by the men who were there, and one of the Allies' biggest fighting forces, the Fourteenth Army, is known as 'the Forgotten Army'. On March 3, former British soldier Albert 'Bert' Warne – thought to be the last survivor of the Thai-Burma Railway – died at the age of 105. Even now, as we approach the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War – with VJ Day on August 15 – the Burma Campaign is overlooked next to the war in Europe. Japan wanted Burma – modern-day Myanmar – so it could cut off the Burma Road, a supply route into China. Burma also put Japan in a position to invade India. In February 1942, 35,000 Japanese troops forced 85,000 British, Australian, and Indian soldiers into a humiliating surrender at Singapore – the biggest capitulation in British military history. POWs were kept at the Changi prison camp and work camps around Singapore. The Narrow Road to the Deep North depicts just a small number of the 13,000 Australian men who worked on the railway – 2,700 of whom died. Around 60,000 POWs in total were shipped to work on railway construction along with labourers from Burma, Java and Malaya, collectively dubbed 'Romusha'. Some of the Romusha volunteered to work on the railway for a pound of rice per day, and many were conscripted by the puppet Burmese government. The best estimate is that a total of 240,000 men worked on the railway, which ran for 415km between Thailand and Burma, and had 688 bridges. It was intended as a military supply line for troops and equipment, and for an invasion of India. In The Bridge on the River Kwai, Guinness plays Lt Col Nicholson, who is ordered to build a bridge after arriving at a POW camp. As per the Geneva Convention, Nicholson refuses to allow his officers to do any labour which begins a standoff with the Japanese commander, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Saito throws Nicholson into an iron box – 'the oven' – to force him into submission. But Saito underestimates how far the British will go to prove a point, even if it means merrily rotting in a metal box for a week. Saito relents and Nicholson makes building the bridge a matter of patriotic pride, demonstrating the superiority of British engineering and efficiency. Nicholson's camp is based on the real-life Tamarkan camp in Thailand, where there were actually two bridges – a wooden bridge and a steel bridge – built across the Mae Klong (the railway ran along the Khwae Noi, meaning 'little river', which is where the River Kwai name comes from). In the film, gung-ho commandos blow up the bridge, which didn't happen in real life, nor in the original novel by Pierre Boulle. Philip Toosey, the inspiration behind Guinness's Lt Col Nicholson, was among the British troops taken prisoner in Singapore. He was sent to Tamarkan, on the east side of the Mae Klong, where he was in charge of 2,500 men – British, Australian and Dutch – who worked alongside Asian labour. Emaciated workers heaved around the materials while Japanese engineers did the technical construction. Those engineers were equally as offended by The Bridge of the River Kwai: they didn't need British expertise and they'd been planning the railway as far back as 1937. Another soldier captured at Singapore was Corp Bill Norways, a commercial artist from Hackney who was drafted into the Cambridgeshire Regiment. Norway's son, Toby Norways, a screenwriter and lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire, explains how his father was shipped to Thailand. 'He was part of H Force, a group of 27 men put on steel cattle trucks,' says Norways. 'They hardly had room to lie down or sleep. They'd be fed intermittently. People died en route. They spent five days on the truck. The majority of them were suffering from dysentery or malaria. They had nowhere to go to the toilet. They were just defecating and pissing.' Once the men arrived, they had to walk to whichever camp they were instructed to work at. 'They were weak and enfeebled but had to march up to 20 miles a day, largely at night, with limited rations and footwear,' says Norways. Bill Norways worked at the notorious Hellfire Pass, where men had to blast through rock faces to create a railway cutting. The conditions were horrendous. Men were forced to work brutal hours in monsoon season, ravaged with illness and with insufficient food. They ate a thin gruel made from a small helping of rice and vegetables. The food – originally intended for a workforce of 50,000 – had to stretch to 200,000-plus. Whole camps of Malayan workers were wiped out by cholera. For historian Robert Lyman, author of A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain, this is a key omission from all Burma railway stories: the sheer numbers of Asian labourers, many of them Tamil Indians from Malaya, who died. 'No one talks about them at all,' he says. An estimated 56 percent of Malayans – 42,000 men – perished, as well as 40,000 Burmese. The men were so vitamin deficient that a small nick from bamboo could lead them to having limbs removed. One doctor took 120 legs over a nine-month period using just a basic hand saw usually used for wood. Some camps had anaesthetic, others didn't. In one uncomfortably realistic scene in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Dorrigo saws a chunk of gangrenous leg off a fellow POW. Bill Norways himself was stabbed in the buttock with a bamboo spear, a wound that was treated with maggots, and – after the railway was completed in October 1943 – he spent six months in a hospital camp suffering from cardiac beriberi, bronchitis, malaria, dysentery, and an abscess. Like many FEPOWs, Norways never talked about his experiences. 'They were told not to when they got home,' says his son. 'They were issued a document from the British Army telling them not to speak to friends and relatives because it might upset people.' There was, he suggests, a sense of shame too. The older Dorrigo says something similar in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 'More humiliating than anything,' says Dorrigo about being a POW. 'Letting yourself be incarcerated when others are fighting is hard for a soldier's spirit to accept.' While the emotional heft of The Narrow Road to the Deep North lingers on Dorrigo's memories of a decades-old love affair, its depiction of the railway is painfully bleak – relentless torture and skeletal, diseased men stumbling to their deaths. It's a sense of harrowing realism that's far beyond The Bridge on the River Kwai. The Bridge on the River Kwai had its difficulties, though. Shot in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in punishing heat and humidity, it was a difficult production that required an actual bridge to be built (and blown up) in the jungle. Director David Lean fell out with almost everyone and there were serious accidents – near drownings and a car crash that killed second-unit director John Kerrison. Guinness was reportedly concerned with the film being anti-British. But, on the contrary, its Britishness is something to revel in. 'Colonel, do you suppose we could have a cup of tea?' says Nicholson at one point, getting his priorities straight before starting work on the Death Railway. According to Julie Summers, who spoke to me in 2020, the difference between Guinness's character and Philip Toosey was that 'Alec Guinness was all about the bridge and [her] grandfather was all about the men.' The death rate among the Brits was 22 per cent, but just a handful of men at Toosey's camp died. In the film, Nicholson forbids anyone from attempting to escape. The real soldiers signed a document – under duress and therefore illegally – agreeing that they wouldn't escape. Some did escape from the camp but were recaptured. They were taken out into the jungles and forced to dig their own graves before being killed. The soldiers were shot, the officers bayoneted. 'My grandfather said it was terrible,' said Summers. 'The look of loss in their eyes as they were driven away. They knew they were going to be killed.' Toosey himself faced brutal treatment from the Japanese guards, largely for complaining about beatings his men suffered. 'Almost inevitably, he'd get hit over his head,' Summers said. 'He wasn't tortured but bashed about. He was once made to stand outside the guard hut in the boiling sun for 24 hours. There were times when he thought, 'I can't go to that guard hut again… no, the men need me to!'' And though Toosey wasn't locked in 'the oven', a similar thing happened to translator Capt William Drower, who upset his captors. His arm was broken and he was imprisoned in an underground hovel for 76 days. While in there, a rat ate into his foot. When Toosey saw Alec Guinness confronting Saito in the film, Toosey said: 'You could never have confronted the Japanese and caused them to lose face. That would have been fatal. I would not have survived.' There was a real Saito at Tamarkan, though the name connection is likely coincidental. Toosey thought the real Saito was 'fair', and spoke up in his defence after the war. In 1984, Saito came to Britain and visited Toosey's grave. On a similar note, Bill Norways struck up a friendship with a Japanese guard, Kameo Yamanaka, and they exchanged letters for 30 years. In 2015, Toby Norways travelled to Ibaraki, Japan to meet Yamanaka's family. He found that a poem his father had written to the guard had been inscribed on a slab of granite next to Yamanaka's grave. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, there's an inkling of a friendship between Dorrigo and camp commander, Major Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu), before the pressure to deliver the railway sees Nakamura order the protracted torture of one POW. In truth, friendships like the one between Norways and Yamanaka, notes Toby, were 'extremely unusual'. When The Bridge on the River Kwai was released, POWs wanted the filmmakers to include a statement explaining that the film was based on a book, and not the true story. 'But they never did,' Summers said. 'And why would they? It's Hollywood. They were out to make the greatest war movie of all time – and some would say they succeeded.' In reality, the wooden bridge was completed by February 1943 and the steel bridge in May 1943. The wooden bridge was hit by bombs nine times and rebuilt nine times. The steel bridge was hit by the US Air Force in 1945 and rebuilt. It still stands today, and that part of the Mae Klong has been renamed the Khwae Yai. The Burma Campaign was hugely important in ending the Second World War, argues the historian Lyman. Following the initial defeat to the Japanese, the Allies regrouped. Lt-Gen William Slim's 'forgotten' Fourteenth Army – which was 87 per cent Indian – won crucial victories at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, though its heroism was not widely reported back home. 'That constituted the first major defeat of Japanese field armies in the Second World War,' he argues. 'It was the destruction of this marshal bubble, this samurai idea that defined what Japan was and what it could achieve through use of force. Japan needed to be persuaded there was nothing further they could achieve by use of force.' But he continues: 'British soldiers in the Far East considered themselves to be at the end of a very long, dirty stick. People in the UK didn't appreciate what was going on.' The fight for recognition continues. FEPOW families still take offence when the war against Japan is overlooked. Complaints have been made, for instance, when the BBC has erroneously called VE Day the end of the Second World War. The BBC made one such error during a two-minute silence to mark the 75th anniversary of the Second World War. 'This incenses people involved because VJ Day wasn't until August 15 and actually many people were still in prison camps waiting to be repatriated,' says Norways. 'My dad didn't come home until October 1945. While everyone was waving flags in Trafalgar Square, people were still dying in Singapore.' The memory of what the men experienced is fundamental to The Narrow Road to the Deep North, though, of course, it's just an approximation of what happened. Neither the brutality of the new series nor the Hollywood version in The Bridge on the River Kwai can possibly give the full picture. As Dorrigo tells a reporter, it's impossible to comprehend. 'Because you weren't there.' The Narrow Road to the Deep North is on Amazon Prime Video now Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
