The Narrow Road to the Deep North

When Dorrigo is old, he ruminates about life: “A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else” (4). He is unsure of whether he made the quote up, or if he is repeating something he heard. On the day he saw Jackie Maguire crying, he had come in from playing outside. He had smashed his finger with a rock and needed his mother to puncture the blood blister with a hot knife. As she works on his fingernail, Jackie says that his wife left him and has vanished.

When he was 20, Tom lived in a cave several miles away. Jackie would take Dorrigo to visit him and read poetry to them by the fire. Dorrigo reveals that a week before Mrs. Maguire disappeared, he had seen Tom kissing her.

When Dorrigo is 12, he passes his school’s “Ability Test” (9) and receives a scholarship to Launceston High School. One day he watches some of the older boys play a game called Kick to Kick, a violent game in which a football is kicked towards a group of boys. Whoever fights his way to the ball gets to kick it next. Someone tells Dorrigo that he must be in at least second form before he’ll physically have a chance at playing. Despite this, Dorrigo sees a punt, runs in, and catches it after leaping off another boy’s back. The older boys look at him with respect: “[He] understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after” (10). His life will never have such meaning again.

Eighteen years after seeing Jackie Maguire cry, Dorrigo is in a hotel bed with a woman named Amy. He is reciting Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” (11) for her. She asks him about the differences between the Greeks and the Trojans, and he does what he can to remember the history. He realizes that he is becoming a fatalist at age 27: “It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words—all the words that did not say things directly—were for him the most truthful” (12).

He remembers his mother dying of tuberculosis when he was 19. He had been studying medicine at the University of Melbourne. He remembers being shocked at how racist many of the people at university were, particularly those from aristocratic families: “He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival” (12).

Amy asks him why he likes words so much. He thinks of his mother’s death again. After her death, he had grown afraid of enclosed spaces. He began reading and rereading Ulysses frequently. He tells Amy that words were “the first beautiful thing [he] ever knew” (14). 

Amy leaves an hour later. Dorrigo asks her to stay, but she can’t. The narrative reveals that they are having an affair, and Dorrigo is leaving for the war on Wednesday, three days later. They do not know if they will ever see each other again. 

Dorrigo, at 77 years old, lies in another bed with a woman. He is thinking about a man named Darky Gardiner. Darky died, and Dorrigo can’t remember his face. He then thinks about his own face: “Two decades before in a television show about his past, it had begun staring back at him from everything from charity letterheads to memorial coins” (16). Dorrigo had become a war hero and a celebrated surgeon. He does not believe he is a hero and is uncomfortable with the adulation, but “to deny the reverence seemed to insult the memory of those who had died” (17). Dorrigo finds that he agrees with his critics more often than his admirers.

He thinks about how aggressively he womanized, and how easy it has always been for him to lie and manipulate. The woman in bed with him in Lynette Maison; she is the wife of a former colleague of Dorrigo’s.

He remembers speaking to a journalist around the time of the documentary. The journalist had wanted his opinion on whether two nuclear bombs had been necessary to end the war. Dorrigo says that their enemies had been “monsters” (16). He remembers that the journalist had reminded him of Darky Gardiner. He quotes poetry to Lynne, who says she would like to hear him talk in his own words more often: “She was fifty-two, beyond children but not folly, and despised herself for the hold the old man had over her” (20).