Richard Flanagan (1) (1961–)

Writing about great atrocities, especially when the atrocity is well-known and the experience is described at second-hand, can be a tricky business - it's all too easy for a writer to employ cheap tricks to milk our emotions without actually saying anything that changes the way we think about the events described. And of course we all know (in outline) about the Burma death railway, and given the number of people caught up in World War II, it's not unlikely that we've met someone who was a show more prisoner of the Japanese "and has not been the same since" (or heard of husbands and sons who never came back). Whilst the survivors I've met hardly ever spoke directly about what had happened to them, you only needed to see the way they reacted to a casual comment about the excellence of Japanese cars or hifi systems to get an idea of the impact the experience had on them.

Which is all a way of saying that Flanagan has to do something special and unexpected to make it worth our while reading this book. And he does, in several different, complementary ways. We get the inevitable vivid and painful descriptions of atrocities, but they are carefully unemotional and objective, obviously rooted in Flanagan's research, focussing on very specific physical things - hunger, injuries, the symptoms of disease - and on the social and cultural mismatch between the Australian prisoners and the Japanese guards. Unlike most writers of PoW stories, Flanagan takes viewpoint characters from both sides, and tries to show us why the Japanese act in the ways they do, and drill down into how a love of poetry can be reconciled with arbitrary beatings and decapitations, and with forcing people to work under conditions where around 20% of the POW workforce (and perhaps 50% of the Asian slave-workers) died in the course of 1942-3. We don't quite get to engage sympathetically with Major Nakamura and Colonel Kota, but we do get at least a thought-provoking glimmer of what the railway project might have looked like to them.

The other major thing that Flanagan does is to put the experience of 1942-3 in the context of his characters' whole lives. What happens when a relatively ordinary person, who has found an ability in himself to respond extraordinarily to an extraordinary situation, returns to "normal life", where such demands don't exist? And what if the experience that you think is defining for your whole life is something completely different from that episode of heroism/war-crimes? This is again risky for Flanagan, because his main Australian character, Dorrigo Evans, tends to act in unattractive ways at home (he's a serial philanderer, and only moderately competent as a surgeon), and we have to spend a good deal of time with him. But he's entirely human: the recurrent references to Tennyson's Ulysses give him a sense of direction we can identify with despite all the motel room adultery, the harping on a lost pre-war love, and the awkward duty-visits to ex-comrades and their widows.

A difficult and challenging book, which perhaps doesn't always hit exactly the note it is aiming for, but it does consistently get close enough to compel you to stay with it despite the occasional dull passage. Very powerful writing in the set-piece scenes, necessary context elsewhere. show less

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a story of the forced labor construction of the Burmese Railway by Australian POW’s in WWII. If you have ever seen Bridge on the River Kwai, you know about the Railway, but even then you may not be aware of the extreme cruelty and horrid conditions under which these men labored and died. I can scarcely bear to read about it, how on earth did any of them survive it? Is it any wonder that so few men who returned ever wanted to talk about these times and show more experiences?

Of course, this is a fiction, so there is a personal story that swims through the historical one. It is the story of Dorrigo Evans, a doctor who helps to hold together the men of the camp, and who suffers from his own anguish that stems from his affair with his uncle’s young wife. This book courses with realism, to an extent that is hard to bear. I found myself at many points simply unable to go any further without taking a step away from the book and the time that preyed on my mind so deeply. It must have been an excruciating book to write.

As well, I was constantly wanting to stop and record passages that bore remembering, particularly those dealing with the facing of the threat of death on a daily basis and those regarding memory.

Do you know the poem, Bonox? It’s by Kipling. It’s not about remembering. It’s about forgetting--how everything gets forgotten.

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Neneveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!

Nothing endures. Don't you see, Bonox? That's what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting."

If anything lays testament to the elusive nature of life, this ordeal does. These men are confronted with life as merely a path to death, and survival at any cost as a goal hardly worth holding onto. What one man is able to do to another, and to justify to themselves, is astonishing...and it is always astonishing, regardless of how many such stories you hear or how many such acts you witness.

I knew very well a man who had been a soldier in Vietnam. He found it difficult to talk about what he had seen in the jungles there, and yet, his mind never strayed far from that place or that time. He replayed events and lost people and atrocities that seemed impossible to have happened to such a sweet, kind American boy. I used to ponder over what he might have been had he not been haunted by that intrusion into his life, if he had never felt the need to drown his memories and silence those ghostly voices. I thought of him as I read this book. War is hell, in ways that even Sherman could not have imagined, and is it any wonder that those who survive are never the same?

The things he believed in were heading out to sea, vanishing, lost forever. The things he thought he was coming home to. The things that he had hoped to become and make his life. It turned out that they weren’t worth a brass razoo.

Can anyone ever atone for such horror? If you do such things but afterward live a life of “goodness”, does it matter? And, why do the good, the honest, the brave often suffer, while the vile, the horrid, the ones who make the hell even more hellish prosper and never pay?

He told himself that, through his service of this cosmic goodness, he had discovered he was not one man but many, that he could do the most terrible things he might otherwise have thought were evil if he had not known that they were in the service of the ultimate goodness. For he loved poetry above all, and the Emperor was a poem of one word…

And what of the good man who finds his own worth in the chaos and horror that is war?

He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.

Dorrigo Evans, Darky Gardiner, Tenji Nakamura, even Amy Mulvaney are characters I will likely never forget. What a deserving winner for the Man Booker, what a remarkable piece of literature, what an astounding capacity to glimpse into the souls of people Richard Flanagan displays. This is one of those rare books that make me wish Goodreads would give us one more button to push, because this book is not a five-star read, it is a ten. show less

I think I'm justified in calling the genre of this book magic realism. However, it's a sort of magic-realism-lite, since it's written by a white English-speaking man with no particular religious background. Yes, there are ghost animals at the dinner table, but they don't actually talk. Yes, there's knowing of the unknowable, but the protagonist is aware he's having a vision and he admits that it might all be imagined. For this reason, it's probably about as palatable to me as magic realism show more will ever be. It's also wonderfully written, with genuinely beautiful passages and a sensitivity to emotion that is incisive, but used with exquisite restraint. The Tasmanian bush comes alive, as does the sad history of that island and its eerie echoes today. This book stands as one of the literary milestones of the last twenty years and is essential reading for anyone visiting Tasmania or who loves to venture into the bush (especially white-water rafting). show less

Review of: The Sound of One Hand Clapping, by Richard Flanagan
by Stan Prager (6-4-17)

To my mind, great literature is best defined by the visceral reaction it triggers and its stubborn lingering effect. After the plot has faded, the names of the characters erased, and the book itself diminished by passing time into a sort of vague mental snapshot of its encounter, the way a great novel makes you feel while you read it cuts a kind of indelible groove that resonates long after the cover is show more closed. That is not only fine writing: that is art. And that is the art in the novels crafted by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan.
My first encounter with Flanagan was Gould’s Book of Fish, a stunningly original and brilliant blend of satire, heartache, love, cruelty, comedy, and existential tragedy, tossed with a superb use of magical realism. Think William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John Irving, all stirring the same pot with different shaped spoons. Originally published in 2001, I consider it the finest novel of the millennium to date. I have since read five of the six books Flanagan has written, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2014. *
The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a much earlier work, published in 1997. The central character is Sonja Buloh, a strong but troubled woman in her late-thirties who returns to her birthplace in Tasmania. The novel’s title–adapted from the famous Zen kōan–evokes the bleak narrative that marked the formative years of Sonja’s life, abandoned at three years old by a mother who disappears into a blizzard, and thereafter shuttled between various temporary households by her often alcoholic and sometimes violent father, Bojan Bojan, a Slovenian immigrant whose parenting ranges from adoration to abuse. Flourishing a technique reminiscent of André Brink in A Chain of Voices, Flanagan skillfully moves between moments in time without losing anchor to the present, exploring Sonja’s childhood and, significantly, Bojan’s young manhood, which smacks of memories littered with atrocities and corpses of Nazis and Slovenian partisans. This is a book of much tragedy, of much disappointment, yet also one of hope and redemption. There is just a hint of the magical realism later manifested Gould’s Book of Fish. But there is here, as in all of Flanagan’s fiction, an abundance of fine prose as well as a masterful use of the objective correlative–a literary device that conjures emotion in the inanimate–often seen in the works of Hemingway and Garcia Marquez.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping has much of the feel of a first novel, although it is not. Flanagan’s first novel was the magnificent Death of a River Guide, which was no doubt a hard act to follow. ** One Hand Clapping seems rougher and less sophisticated than River Guide. There are portions that seem extraneous and beg for edit. It can be slow-going, especially because the elements that make you want to care about the characters are not fully fleshed out until the last third of the book. On more than one occasion there is the thud of the anticlimactic dully falling flat. And yet …
And yet the quality of the prose never disappoints; warts-and-all this is a novel that generously rewards the reader for patience and loyalty to the narrative. After it is done, there remains a powerful urge to read it through again. There are few writers of contemporary literary fiction that can deliver at this level, something a review like this can certainly attest but by all rights demands to be heard in Flanagan’s own voice:

In the great forests beyond, the devils and quolls and possums and potaroos and wombats and wallabies also came to curious life in the night, and they roamed the earth for what little they could scavenge to keep themselves alive, and when they mistakenly ventured onto the new gravel roads that were everywhere invading their world, it was to be mesmerised by the sudden shock of moving electric light that rendered them no longer an element of the great forests or plains, but a poor pitiful creature alone whose fate it was to be crushed between rubber and metal. Having being shown by the electric light to have no existence or meaning or world beyond a glaring outline upon the gravel, each animal was killed easily by the men who drove drunk to and from their place of work, heading to or from the whores and grog and the card games of the bigger towns. By day the roads were speckled red with the resultant carnage and startled hawks feasting on the carcasses would hastily rise into the air dragging rapidly unravelling viscera behind them, a shock of bloodied intestine stretching across the blue sky as if the world itself were wounded. Jiri had told Bojan some people believed that the animals reincarnated as spirits or other animals or even as people. But when Bojan hit a fellow animal he hoped he had done it a favour and relieved it of the burden of life forever. [p268-69]

That is great literature. That is art. That is why, even if it is not his finest novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping should be penciled into everyone’s to-be-read list.

* I reviewed The Narrow Road to the Deep North here: https://regarp.com/2015/02/02/review-of-the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north-by-ric...

** I reviewed Death of a River Guide here: https://regarp.com/2015/07/23/review-of-death-of-a-river-guide-by-richard-flanag...


My review of The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan is live on the book blog here http://wp.me/p5Hb6f-dF show less