‘Books are never going to be the phenomenon Bollywood is’
Novels offer a unique way for the human race to view themselves and Australian author Richard Flanagan feels that literature’s sole responsibility is to be exciting.
The Booker Prize winner says that novels are important for enabling “us to think about us in a way we can’t though poems, politics or philosophy”.
“Though books are never going to be the mass phenomenon, the way Bollywood is, I feel that if writers can do their job with integrity, they will be heard across the oceans and will defy time,” added Flanagan, who attended the Jaipur Literature Festival recently.
At the festival, he read a passage from his 2014 book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The book tells the story of an Australian doctor who is burdened with the memories of his love affair and his horrific experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, on the Death Railway in Thailand during World War II. Flanagan said, “If a writer knew what the book was about, they wouldn’t write so many pages, they would just tweet it.”
The book also mirrors his views about redemptive human qualities such as hope and love. “Memory is what we choose to remember and it is not sentimental to believe in hope, it is a mechanism of love,” he said.
He is ranked among the world’s greatest novelists for his array of half-a-dozen books. He also mentioned that research is overrated. Yet his opinion didn’t stop him from travelling to Japan, where he went to meet a guard from the prisoner of war camp, the place where his father was held during the war.
This was an experience which served as the impetus for his book.