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    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #11
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #11
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #11
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #11

    By Kathryn Cope

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    About this ebook

    An essential tool for all reading groups!

    No reading group should be without this book club companion to Richard Flanagan's Man Booker prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This comprehensive guide includes thought-provoking discussion questions; useful literary and historical context; a detailed plot summary, notes on themes; lists of recommended further reading and a quick quiz.

    Study Guides for Book Clubs are designed to help you get the absolute best from your book club meetings. They enable reading group members to appreciate their chosen book in greater depth than ever before.

    Please be aware that this is a companion guide and does not contain the full text of the novel.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKathryn Cope
    Release dateMar 13, 2020
    ISBN9781393915515
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #11
    Author

    Kathryn Cope

    Kathryn Cope graduated in English Literature from Manchester University and obtained her master’s degree in contemporary fiction from the University of York. She is the author of Study Guides for Book Clubs and the HarperCollins Offical Book Club Guide series. She lives in the Staffordshire Moorlands with her husband, son and dog.

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      Book preview

      Study Guide for Book Clubs - Kathryn Cope

      Introduction

      There are few things more rewarding than getting together with a group of like-minded people and discussing a good book. Book club meetings, at their best, are vibrant, passionate affairs. Each member will bring along a different perspective and ideally there will be heated debate.

      A surprising number of book club members, however, report that their meetings have been a disappointment. Even though their group loved the particular book they were discussing, they could think of astonishingly little to say about it. Failing to find interesting discussion angles for a book is the single most common reason for book group discussions to fall flat. Most book groups only meet once a month and a lacklustre meeting is frustrating for everyone.

      Study Guides for Book Clubs were born out of a passion for book clubs. Packed with information, they take the hard work out of preparing for a meeting and ensure that your book group discussions never run dry. How you choose to use the guides is entirely up to you. The author biography, historical, and literary context sections provide useful background information which may be interesting to share with your group at the beginning of your meeting. The all-important list of discussion questions, which will probably form the core of your meeting, can be found towards the end of this guide. To support your responses to the discussion questions, you may find it helpful to refer to the ‘Themes & Imagery’ and ‘Character’ sections.

      A detailed plot synopsis is provided as an aide-memoire if you need to recap on the finer points of the plot. There is also a quick quiz - a fun way to test your knowledge and bring your discussion to a close. Finally, if this was a book that you particularly enjoyed, the guide concludes with a list of books similar in style or subject matter.

      Be warned, this guide contains spoilers. Please do not be tempted to read it before you have read the original novel as plot surprises will be well and truly ruined.

      Kathryn Cope, 2015

      Richard Flanagan

      Early Life

      Richard Flanagan was born in 1961 and grew up in a small mining town on the Australian island of Tasmania. The fifth of six children, he was an adventurous boy and spent his childhood playing in the rainforest that surrounded his home.

      Both sides of his family were descended from Irish convicts, transported to Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was known at the time) during the Great Famine. Flanagan’s great-great-grandfather was transported as a punishment for stealing eight pounds of cornmeal. His grandparents were poor and illiterate but his father became a state primary school teacher, making him the first one in the Flanagan family to receive an education. Flanagan’s father was an inspiration from an early age, often reciting poetry from memory, and prompting his son to aspire to be a writer.

      Flanagan left school at 16 to work as a bush labourer. He later returned to education, attending the University of Tasmania and graduating with first-class honours. His academic success reached a peak when he won a scholarship to Oxford University, England, to study history. Unfortunately, the experience was not a happy one, as although proud of his convict descent, Flanagan found that many of his fellow students patronised him, referring to him as ‘Don Convict’. On a more positive note, he met his wife there and they married while he was still a student.

      Non-Fiction and Journalism

      On returning to Tasmania, Flanagan began his career as an author by writing several non-fiction books, ranging from a history of the unemployed in Britain (Parish-Fed Bastards published in 1991) to a ghost-written autobiography of ‘Australia’s greatest conman’, John Friedrich. He was already planning to embark upon his first work of fiction and agreed to write Friedrich’s ‘autobiography’ to finance his first novel. Friedrich killed himself partway through the writing process and Codename Iago: The Story of John Friedrich was published posthumously in 1991.

      Flanagan also developed a name in journalism and continues to write non-fiction articles to this day. Writing for both the Australian and international press, his favoured topics are literature, the environment, the arts and politics. His strong stance on environmental issues and politics has often proved controversial in his home country.

      Most notably, Flanagan took on the Tasmanian logging industry, campaigning for it to cease altogether. His 2007 essay ‘Gunns. Out of Control’, attacked the logging company Gunns and inspired a high-profile campaign to stop the building of their billion-dollar Bell Bay Pulp Mill. As a result, Gunns collapsed and the pulp mill was never built. Although the campaign was hugely successful, opponents argued that many Tasmanians rely on the logging industry for their livelihoods and suggested that Flanagan was speaking from a ‘privileged position’. Nevertheless, his essay went on to win the 2008 John Curtin prize for journalism.

      Equally controversial was Flanagan’s essay, ‘The Selling-out of Tasmania’. Published in 2004, after the death of former Premier, Jim Bacon, it was critical of the Bacon government’s links to corporate interests in Tasmania. The article prompted Premier, Paul Lennon, to declare that ‘Richard Flanagan and his fictions are not welcome in the new Tasmania.’

      Flanagan is also a council member of the animal protection charity, Voiceless, and speaks out against animal suffering in factory farming, particularly in the Australian kangaroo industry.

      Another of Flanagan’s bugbears, explored in his journalism, is the ‘disease of conformity’ in Australian society. He believes that Australia, as a society, has not been permitted to develop its own culture and has, instead, unthinkingly absorbed the cultural mores of the USA and England. He has also spoken out against the meaninglessness of political rhetoric in Australia – particularly the notion that immigrants are overrunning the country. A collection of Flanagan’s most notable essays was published in 2011 as And what do you do, Mr Gable?

      Earlier Fiction

      Flanagan’s career as a full-time novelist began with the publication of his first novel, Death of a River Guide. Inspired by his own experience of being trapped in rapids in a kayak, it tells the story of Aljaz Cosini, a guide on the Franklin River who relives his life and the lives of his ancestors as he drowns. The novel met with critical acclaim and won several major Australian literary prizes, including the 1996 National Fiction award. It was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award.

      The Sound of One Hand Clapping was Flanagan’s second novel, published in 1997. Set in the Central Highlands of Tasmania, it examines the Tasmanian immigrant experience from the point of view of a Slovenian family. One night, during a snowstorm, Maria Buloh walks out on her husband and three-year-old daughter, Sonja, never to return. Sonja never knows what happened to her mother and, in her late thirties, returns to Tasmania to visit her father. The visit involves a painful examination of the past as Sonja and her father move towards a tentative reconciliation. Once again, Flanagan was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award for this novel and it won the Australian Booksellers’ Book of the Year award, as well as the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Flanagan went on to direct a film version of the novel in 1998, starring Kerry Fox. This was his first film venture – he later co-wrote the screenplay for Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 film, ‘Australia’, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

      With the publication of his third novel, Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001), Flanagan became an international literary figure. Set in the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station in 1828, it is a literary re-imagining of the life of Billy Gould, a convict artist who, during his imprisonment, painted 26 beautiful watercolours of fish. Flanagan’s vivid recreation of a lost Australian voice in this novel is reminiscent of Peter Carey’s re-imagining of Ned Kelly in his Booker-Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang. Gould’s Book of Fish was extraordinary not only for its literary merit (the novel is full of linguistic game-playing and trickery) but also for its beauty. It was illustrated with reproductions of Willliam Buelow Gould’s intricate paintings. The novel was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award and won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the South East Asia and South Pacific region.

      The Unknown Terrorist, published in 2007, marked a surprising foray for Flanagan into the territory of the thriller. Gina Davis, a Sydney lap dancer, becomes the prime suspect in a terrorism investigation after spending the night with a man who may have been an al-Qaeda operative. The novel details Gina’s life on the run and examines the way in which fear of the unknown can push a society to breaking point.

      Flanagan’s fifth novel, Wanting (2008), returned to more familiar, historical territory. It relates two parallel stories taking place on different sides of the globe: that of Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens, in England and that of Mathinna, an aboriginal orphan, adopted by the colonial Governor of Van Diemen’s Land and his wife.

      The Narrow Road to the Deep North

      Flanagan’s sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, proved the most difficult to write. He worked on it, on and off, for twelve years and wrote five different versions, each of which he deleted, believing them to be worthless. During this time, Flanagan and his family suffered financially and he considered abandoning writing and going to work in north-west Australia’s mines instead. Flanagan sensed, however, that if he could not complete the novel, he would never be able to write fiction again. In the end, he spent four months living in isolation on a small Tasmanian island in order to finish it.

      A large part of the difficulty for Flanagan was doing justice

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