Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 1994

Type of work: Novel

The Work

Flanagan’s breathtaking debut novel opens with the protagonist, Aljaz Cosini, trapped among rocks, under a waterfall. He is at the point of death, drowning, and as is expected of drowning people, his life is flashing before his eyes. However, it is not simply a matter of recapitulating his own life. Aljaz has also been granted visions and he is traveling beyond his own life, into the lives of others, the earlier members of his own family. Through their eyes he learns not only the history of his family but also of Tasmania itself.

Aljaz has only taken on this job to help out an acquaintance, having recently returned to Tasmania. His father has just died and he is alone in the world, with nothing to tie him down. He is being paid badly, and the river trip is poorly equipped; he is also out of condition, having long since given up working as a river guide. However, he has got nothing else going on in his life, and as he has drifted through life over the last few years, so he drifts into this final job, afraid, uncertain, but at the same time determined to do the decent thing by his clients.

In fact, as Aljaz lies under the water, he tells three stories. One is his own, beginning with his birth in Italy to the mercurial Sonja and the absent Harry, and moving forward in time through his relationship with the enigmatic Couta Ho, from another generation of immigrants, and the loss of their child, Jemma, to the ill-fated river rafting expedition and his imminent death. The second is the story of the rafting expedition itself, while the final story is one that comes to him in flashes and visions, which send him traveling back and forth through time.

This last is the story of Harry’s family, the Lewises and the Quades, decent, honest settlers, as Harry’s mother, Rose, insists, not like the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania, as it was later called. Harry’s father, Boy, was a lumberjack and a trapper. After Rose died, Harry went up into the mountains to work with his father until Boy was killed by a falling tree, after which Harry wandered the world, ending up in Italy, where he met Aljaz’s mother, Sonja.

However, as visions assail Aljaz, he begins to realize that his family’s beginnings are much more complex than he had been led to believe. His family are not the settlers his grandmother insisted they were but instead are descended from convicts. There was no mayor of Parramatta, but instead there was Ned Quade, transported from Salford, England, a convict who escaped and tried to make his way home. No one in Tasmania is quite what he seems to be, but each has a respectable cover story; everyone insists they came to Tasmania of their own free will.

As the visions intensify, Aljaz sees how his family’s story is also a story that reflects the history of European settlement in Tasmania, even up to the present day and his arrival there with his mother. Gradually, however, he begins to see that there is another, secret history, more secret even than the fact of having convict ancestors. Throughout the novel there is an awareness of the indigenous inhabitants of Tasmania, the Aboriginal peoples, being displaced from their lands or murdered, but by the present day they have vanished, seemingly without trace. However, as Aljaz gradually comes to realize, while the Aboriginal people may no longer be visible, they still exist in the interstices of the white world. All of his life he has been taunted by other white Tasmanians for being an “immigrant.” It turns out, as the reader has probably already suspected for some time and perhaps Aljaz himself has guessed, that his father’s family is not as “white” as it claims to be and that he in fact has Aboriginal ancestors, thus tying him more closely to the land than most of the people who taunted him.

Aljaz’s death is inevitable and is indeed signaled in the novel’s title. Yet in his dying Aljaz transcends the wretchedness of his recent life and at long last finds a secure place for himself, among his ancestors, a part of the history of Tasmania, the country he finds he cannot live within, but from which he cannot live away.

Bibliography

Bonner, Raymond. “Tasmanian Literary Prize Shunned by Its Originator.” The New York Times, April 22, 2003, p. E3.

Delrez, Marc. “Nationalism, Reconciliation, and the Cultural Genealogy of Magic in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 42, no. 2 (2007): 117-129.

Flanagan, Richard. “Hook, Line, and Thinker.” Interview by Kate Kellaway. The Observer, June 9, 2002, p. 15.

Flanagan, Richard. “Intimations of Mortality: Richard Flanagan Interviewed.” Interview by Chris Wisbey. Island Magazine 66 (Fall, 1996).

Flanagan, Richard. “Points of Origin.” Interview by Elizabeth McMahon. Island Magazine 75 (Winter, 1998).

Shipway, Jesse. “Wishing for Modernity: Temporality and Desire in Gould’s Book of Fish.” Australian Literary Studies. 21, no. 1 (May, 2003): 45-53.