Richard Flanagan

• Born: July 1, 1961
• Place of Birth: Rosebery, Tasmania, Australia

Biography

Richard Flanagan (FLAN-ih-guhn) was born in Rosebery, Tasmania, Australia, in 1961, the fifth of six children and the descendant of Irish convicts transported to Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen’s Land) during the Great Famine of the 1840s. He spent his childhood in Rosebery, a small mining town on the west coast of Tasmania, an area that has featured extensively in his novels.

Flanagan left school at sixteen to work as a bush laborer but later attended the University of Tasmania, earning a first class honors degree in 1982. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and attended the University of Oxford in England, where he earned a master’s degree in literature in 1983. Like the protagonist of his first novel, Flanagan has worked as a river guide, and he took part in the first expedition to canoe the Jane River and the Gordon Gorge. He has also worked as a building laborer.

Flanagan’s first novel was the now much celebrated Death of a River Guide (1994), which was so popular that it sold out its entire print run of 3,500 copies in less than four weeks—an unusual development for an Australian first novel. A second print run sold out almost as quickly. Death of a River Guide went on to win the 1996 National Fiction Award in Australia and the 1995 Victorian Premier’s Award for First Fiction. His second novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), was similarly successful, winning the 1999 Australian Booksellers Book of the Year Award, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, and the 1998 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Best Novel. Flanagan also took part in adapting the novel for film in 1998.

Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001), Flanagan’s third novel, drew attention not only for its story but for its production, featuring colored portraits of the fish mentioned in the novel, with the text printed in a variety of different colored inks. It won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book in the Southeast Asia and South Pacific Region and was short-listed for the 2002 Miles Franklin Award. Flanagan’s next novel, The Unknown Terrorist, was published in 2006.

In 2008, the same year in which he applied his writing talent to Hollywood filmmaking by helping to write the screenplay for the epic drama Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, Flanagan published the historical novel Wanting. Three years later, selections of his significant nonfiction writings were gathered together and published. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, published in 2013, would serve as one of his most acclaimed novels to date, earning him the 2014 Man Booker Prize. The book focuses on a surgeon struggling to survive in a Japanese POW camp during World War II. Further proving his versatility, after publishing the nonfiction work Notes on an Exodus (2016), which chronicles the time that he spent in Lebanon, Greece, and Serbia surveying the journey of large numbers of refugees from Syria, he wrote the novel First Person, which was first published in Australia in the fall of 2017. Flanagan published The Living Sea of Waking Dreams in 2020. The novel is about an old woman who would like to die in peace but her children go to great lengths to prevent her death.

Flanagan is also a well-known and outspoken campaigner on environmental and political issues in Tasmania. He has been highly critical of the Tasmanian government and regularly campaigns against activities he regards as being detrimental to the Tasmanian landscape and its inhabitants. He has expressed his views in nonfiction. In Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry (2021), Flanagan explains how the Tasmanian salmon farming industry touts its product as being safe and healthy, when in reality, the industry's practices are harmful to people, the salmon, and the environment. Question 7 (2023) is part memoir and part history, as Flanagan explores his past and the circumstances that shaped him.

Analysis

In an interview after Death of a River Guide was published, Flanagan commented that “Art is the closest thing we have to holding on to that inner spirit world that we feel always to be on the verge of vanishing and which we recall only as the vaguest of sensations: the touch of a loved one, the shadow of a forgotten tree, the sound of a parent crying.” Flanagan’s concern to hold onto that “inner spirit world” is shown time and again in his novels. His characters are preoccupied with remembering the past or with reclaiming lost details of their own lives.

As he lies trapped under a waterfall, Aljaz Cosini, the eponymous river guide, becomes the conduit for the memories not only of his immediate family but of all his ancestors. On the one hand, he relives the parts they played in the creation of Tasmania as a country and a landscape, but on the other hand, his visions recapture all the tiny details of their lives that no one thought to record. The dilemma of William Buelow Gould, the protagonist in Gould’s Book of Fish, lies in the fact that he has created a fake life for himself because he has no other life available to him, but Flanagan then poses two questions: What happens if you start to believe in the identity you have constructed for yourself, and what happens if that identity is revealed to be a fake? Flanagan is immensely preoccupied with the opportunities that migration presents for people to literally reinvent themselves but also with the ways in which they lie to themselves as a result of having that chance to make themselves anew.

Flanagan is also fascinated by the structures of narrative, and both Death of a River Guide and Gould’s Book of Fish experiment with ways of breaking out of conventional narrative frameworks. Death of a River Guide works with three different narrative threads, two working forward in time, and one working backward in time, with all three interlinking and criss-crossing to produce a complex picture of the immigrant experience in Tasmania. Gould’s Book of Fish employs what appears at first sight to be a standard framing device, with an unreliable narrator telling a story from within the framing device. Only gradually does it become clear that no part of this narrative structure can be safely relied on and that the whole narrative is in fact gradually collapsing in on itself, under the weight of its own artifice. As Flanagan clearly shows, there is no one person to whom ownership of the creative act can be fully assigned. Everyone, including the reader, is participating.

Death of a River Guide

First published: 1994

Type of work: Novel

Trapped beneath a waterfall on the Franklin River in Tasmania as he lies drowning, Aljaz Cosini, a river guide, travels back in time, seeing not only his life but that of his family, friends, and ancestors, providing a unique perspective on the turbulent history of Tasmania.

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.

Gould’s Book of Fish

First published: 2001

Type of work: Novel

A first-person narrative in which William Buelow Gould, convict and reluctant artist, tells a story of the settlement of Tasmania through the paintings that he is obliged to produce.

Who William Buelow Gould was to begin with will never be known. Gould himself has no idea who he really was, other than that he was the product of a nameless man who died making love to a nameless woman who died in the act of childbirth. Young William is brought up in the poorhouse until apprenticed to a stonemason. Unsuited to the heavy work, he runs away to London and begins an odyssey that will take him across the world, finally arriving at the Tasmanian penal colony of Sarah Island.

Indeed, Gould never set out to be a painter at all; all he wanted to do was survive. As luck would have it, in America he falls in with Jean-Babeuf Audubon, with whom he embarks on an abortive business venture. Audubon, not unlike his namesake John James, is a painter of birds, and from him Gould gets the first inkling of what it might mean to be an artist. However, Gould himself has no particular interest in painting until he reaches a situation where claiming to be an artist will conveniently get him out of trouble. At this point, Gould assumes the identity of an artist, helped by having worked for a few months decorating porcelain, and he manages to fake his way as such until, having arrived at Sarah Island, he finds himself employed by the prison doctor.

Tobias Lempriere is desperate to become a fellow of the Royal Society, and he believes that Gould’s skills will help him to secure this coveted position by having Gould paint the fish of Macquarie Harbor. At first, Gould struggles to fulfil Lempriere’s demands; he is more used to painting copies of old master paintings. However, almost in spite of himself, Gould begins to paint in earnest, and he struggles with the fact that he is no longer faking his skills, as he has faked so much throughout his life, but is in fact an artist.

However, the reader learns Gould’s story through words rather than through pictures. Gould is, or so he claims, writing his life story while imprisoned in a cell that is flooded by the tide twice a day, and which also contains the rotting corpse of a man whom Gould has indirectly killed. He is, by his own admission, an entirely unreliable narrator, and the experienced reader will have noticed that someone—perhaps Gould, perhaps someone else—has studded Gould’s narrative with elements of other stories. An episode from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759–67) makes an appearance, as does a fragment of plot from Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). These are stories Gould is unlikely to have come across, which throws open the question of whether this is Gould’s own narrative, or whether Gould even existed.

For Gould’s narrative is in fact being re-created by one Sid Hammet, who found the book in a junk shop and was entranced by the extraordinary paintings and the peculiar, multicolored narrative, until one night he left the book on a pub counter and, so he says, lost it. The narrative that is available to readers is Sid’s recollection of Gould’s narrative rather than the book itself, and it may in turn be wrong. Gould’s own concern in writing his narrative is to record his autobiography, having discovered that the official history of the Sarah Island penal colony is at considerable variance to his actual experience. Whereas Gould sees the island commandant’s megalomanic desire to build an empire, fired by letters (faked letters, it turns out) from the sister of the man whose identity he assumed, Gould discovers that the colony’s official records have been faked. Instead of recording the effects of the commandant’s insanity, they show a colony gradually being established and becoming successful. Which is accurate? It is impossible to say.

Gould escapes from the penal colony and travels into the Tasmanian interior. However, he begins to become aware that the narrative that holds his world together is disintegrating around him. Most significantly, he becomes aware of his own fictional nature, as his world and someone’s re-creation of it begin to collapse into one another. Finally, Gould believes he has become a fish, a weedy sea dragon, and the story comes full circle, as he is now the fish that Sid Hammet is staring at in a tank. Except that nothing is at all certain.

Flanagan’s novel questions the entire nature of fiction and forgery, a subject particularly pertinent in Australian culture, with its long history of literary fakery and reinvention of identity.

Summary

Richard Flanagan’s novels explore the nature of Tasmania, his native land and a place of which he is inordinately proud. Flanagan does not hesitate to address the darker side of Tasmania’s history as a penal colony, nor the fact that the country’s indigenous inhabitants were all but exterminated by white settlers. However, he also seeks to show that his country’s history is more complex than a simple matter of settlement and extinction. For Flanagan, Tasmania’s history is closely related to the land, but he also shows how modern Tasmanians are affected, often unwittingly, by the experiences of their forefathers and that they carry the history of their country deep inside themselves. Flanagan’s role as a writer is to remind the world of this.

Bibliography

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

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

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

Flanagan, Richard. "Richard Flanagan: 'Fiction Is Not a Lie, but a Truth, a Necessary Truth.'" Interview by Stephanie Cross. The Guardian, 5 Nov. 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/05/richard-flanagan-first-person-new-novel. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

Knox, Malcolm. "After the Booker: Why Richard Flanagan Isn't Playing Safe." The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Sept. 2017, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/after-the-booker-why-richard-flanagan-isnt-playing-safe-20170908-gydcs9.html. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

"Richard Flanagan Interview: Winning the Booker Was 'A Catastrophe of Good Fortune'." The Booker Prizes, 7 Aug. 2023, thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/richard-flanagan-interview-the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

Winch, Tara June. "Question 7 by Richard Flanagan Review--This Deeply Moving Book Is His Finest Work." The Guardian, 2 Nov. 2023, www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/02/question-7-by-richard-flanagan-book-review. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.