WRITER, ROMANTIC, TELLER OF TRUTHS
‘The world owes you nothing,’ says author Richard Flanagan
As the publishing world falters and authors suffer with lower and lower advances, Richard Flanagan is something of a realist.
“No one makes you be a writer,” he says. “You choose it, and the world owes you nothing.”
And yet, he’s an unabashed romantic, too: Not only does he continue to make that choice, but he works with greater and greater ambition. Shortly before publishing the 2014 Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Flanagan was “finished financially,” so he figured he might find work cooking or cleaning in the mines to the far northwest of his native Australia. His hope was to make enough money “to survive for another three years and write a book.”
Thankfully, there was no need. Twelve years in the writing, The Narrow Road — inspired by his father’s experience as a Japanese prisoner of war building the Death Railway in the Siamese jungle — has become a hit.
Flanagan’s success feels like poetic justice. Now doing the rounds of North American publicity with some bemusement, he knocks back a double espresso at a cafe. He’s fighting jet lag from a 30-hour trip from his home in Tasmania, but he speaks with the same intensity of feeling that runs through his book.
The Narrow Road flips back and forth across the 20th century, nestling a horrific account of malnourished, beaten and dying prisoners within the love story between its protagonist, the army doctor Dorrigo Evans, and his cousin’s wife back home.
“Love is the greatest expres- sion of hope,” says Flanagan, and “death speaks to that great spiritual and psychological truth of love, of the infinity vanishing a moment later.”
In other words, there is no happily ever after. So for Flanagan, “If a story about death and war demands hope, equally a story about love demands death.”
He’s given to pronouncements such as, “Literature lives in that abyss between the dream and the failure” — and his protagonist, the Tennyson-quoting Evans, says much the same thing.
Flanagan writes with a swing-for-the-fences gusto that flusters cynics: Poet Michael Hoffman panned the book in the London Review of Books in December, claiming: “The writing is overstuffed, and leaks sawdust.”
In response, A.C. Grayling, last year’s Booker Prize chair, suggested the review was “written on a bad hemorrhoid day.”
Clearly the Booker has had an impact. According to Flanagan’s agent, Andrew Wylie, there was “a lot of resistance ... to buying the book prior to the Booker, and now you have to beat publishers off with a bat.”
Flanagan himself feels somewhat distanced: “Fundamentally, literature’s about failure, not success. It’s to fail with ever greater ambition. It is a journey into humility that you have to keep on making. Novels in the end are chaotic and imperfect.”
To succeed at being a writer, he says, one needs to be a “moving target.”
His five novels before The Narrow Road are each substantially different from the last, including the innovative Gould’s Book of Fish: A Life in Twelve Fish (2001), the fictionalized memoir of a real-life 19th century painter, shot through with Gould’s own sketches; and, The Unknown Terrorist (2007), a contemporary thriller laced with cultural critique.
For Flanagan, “writers who repeat themselves end up disappointing you — because what works initially as a way of telling the truth becomes a way of cheating your reader.”
In his struggles both to diverge from what he’d done before and to do justice to his subject matter, Flanagan toiled away at five different incarnations of The Narrow Road, each with several drafts. At first, it was a book made up of linked haiku, and then a haibun (a Japanese form of nature journal), and later “a huge sprawling epic with a whole ensemble cast of characters” written in first-person plural.
He burned the drafts when he realized they didn’t work.
Having felt that “all other possibilities were exhausted,” he came to the book’s eventual form, and its storytelling richness draws on its own long history. The third-person narration peers over Dorrigo’s shoulder but also gives us access to his lovers, his fellow prisoners, even the Japanese officers who preside over the inhuman torment.
In the process, Flanagan reopens a historical wound, approaching it from varied perspectives. His father didn’t talk much about his own experience, and Flanagan understands this.
“In this age of the public confessional, where people put everything up on social media about why they wept this morning in front of the mirror, it’s deemed that it’s always good to tell everything about trauma — I think the taboo truth of our times is that man survives by his ability to forget.”
In writing the book, Flanagan tried to understand something of what had happened in Siam, but he couldn’t. Instead, he says, “I felt I’d written about love in the shadow of death, which was my father’s dying.”
Flanagan senior died at 98, on the day his son finished the book. His mother died three weeks after Flanagan won the Booker.
“That changes your life, and you realize something like the prize doesn’t change a lot.”
And yet, what it does, beyond allowing him to work without contemplating selling his house, is to bring more people to his books.
“If there’s a defence to be made of novels in this age,” he says, “it’s (that) in a period when so many people feel alone and isolated, if you write a novel that succeeds, you realize that it’s not just you — that you are connected. That seems a wonderful thing to me.”
Writers who repeat themselves end up disappointing you — because what works initially as a way of telling the truth becomes a way of cheating your reader.