As with all great novels, there’s an inescapable hook contained within first lines of Man Booker Prize-winner Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road To The Deep North.

It’s delivered with an incredible economy that grasps you by the shoulders and wrenches you head first, deep into the turbulent waters of the life of one Dorrigo Evans.

Based on the real-life experiences of Tasmanian author Flanagan’s own father, it’s akin to the epics of yesteryear in its ability to capture the essence of the human spirit, of the intimate balance of life and death, of history in the making, played out against the backdrop of war.

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It’s telling that Dorrigo is captivated by Tennyson’s Ulysses, and that the novel takes its name from the Japanese classic by revered poet Basho.

Flanagan’s father, the prisoner 335 of the book’s dedication, was taken, along with thousands of Australian soldiers, as a POW by the Japanese forces after the Allies surrender of Singapore. They were forced, under horrific conditions, to carve a great swathe out of all but impenetrable jungle, in order to create a supply rail link from then Burma to Siam, under the unbending orders of the Japanese Emperor. Thousands died, buried in unmarked graves beside what has come to be known as the Death Railway.

While The Narrow Road To The Deep North does not flinch from depicting these atrocities, it is also imbued with a throbbing heart and a deep vein of hope, even if the stoically troubled Dorrigo seems incapable of recognising his own achievements. His doubtful nature is there in the first line, but so to is the promise of better times. “Why at the beginning of things is there always light?”

The Narrow Road to Deep North is Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel.

To read Flanagan’s sixth novel is to witness a master of his craft at work. The Narrow Road To The Deep North is capable of balancing both despair and and joy on a knife’s edge.

Dancing seamlessly through decades, from the earliest recollections of a young Dorrigo, to the horrors of the Death Railway and then to doting old age, it always waltzes back to his first great, forbidden, love for Amy Mulvaney, his uncle’s wife.

Long before their affair is consummated, Flanagan’s prose crackles with the electrical charge arcing between them. “Nothing had happened and yet he knew something had begun.” When they are apart, her absence is keenly felt: “He read books. He liked none of them. He searched their pages for Amy. She was not there… the world, in all its infinite wonder, bored him.”

Time is not the only artful mechanism at play here. Flanagan also skillfully darts between the internal and external, from one voice to another. As intimately as we come to know Dorrigo, we’re left with just as strong a picture of Amy, his fellow soldiers, with their colourful names, and, most powerfully, his captor, Major Nakamura.

The scenes that deal with his methamphetamine addiction and tick infestation drip with the unbearable humidity of their hellish jungle internment, and the murky moral depths of his actions play out grandly.

There’s a wonderful symmetry between these two men, Dorrigo and Nakamura, illustrated by an early scene depicting Dorrigo’s father wiping pig fat from a blade and then heating it in the fire before piercing his son’s cuticle and puncturing a painful blood blister. This brutal but loving moment is hauntingly recalled when Nakamura uses his samurai sword to sever the head of a prisoner, noting with incredulity the traces of neck fat left on the blade, “…the red of his blood, the white of his bone, the pink of his flesh, the yellow of that fat. Life! Those colours were life itself.”

As gruesome as that vision may be, there’s a ferocious power held in it too. Flanagan’s imagery is, at all times, superbly rich.

Each of his characters are as real on the page as any timeless creation of Dickens, Fitzgerald or the Brontes, and just as memorable. In exorcising the pain of his father’s loss, Flanagan has gifted us, in The Narrow Road To The Deep North, a new classic of our time, utterly deserving of the Man Booker accolade.