Flanagan’s path to Tasmania passed through Faulkner’s Mississippi

SOME years back, on a small, beautiful and storied island to the south of Australia’s mainland, an up-and-coming novelist almost murdered a journalist from this paper. The journo had travelled to Tasmania to interview Richard Flanagan. He was given the traditional welcome accorded to honoured guests by the Flanagan clan: a generous dinner, washed down with copious amounts of slivovitz. (Flanagan’s wife, Majda, is Slovenian.)

The following morning saw an apparently unaffected Flanagan suggest a kayak trip to his under-the-weather interviewer. The pair were to travel by sea to Flanagan’s writing shack on nearby Bruny Island. Some way into the journey the novelist realised his companion was dangerously unwell. He guided them both back to shore and the journalist repaired to bed. The Australian’s man in Tassie later flew out, barely recovered and with only the skeleton of a feature to hand. Indeed, it was only back at his desk that an email appeared with all his questions comprehensively answered.

The story tells us a deal about Flanagan. Generosity of spirit, stamina, a larrikin’s humour, and a determination that the narrative of his life and work should ultimately belong to him. And truly, the story of Flanagan’s emergence as a major figure in Australian (and, as of this week, Anglosphere) literature is as unlikely as they come.

As the author has explained in numerous interviews in recent days, every aspect of his background seemed to count against his emergence as an author. His grandparents were illiterate and his uncle lived in a cave, scraping a living by snaring possums. Flanagan grew up in the small mining community of Longford in Tasmania’s northeast, the fifth of six siblings, his schoolteacher father, a former prisoner of war, the only member of the family to have completed high school.

Flanagan came close to missing out himself. The author left school at 16 and completed his studies at the University of Tasmania. He later won a Rhodes scholarship and spent an unhappy period at Worcester College, Oxford. He wrote four works of nonfiction before taking up the novel 20-odd years ago. That first title, Death of a River Guide, published in 1994, was immediately hailed as the work of a hugely talented writer. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, it lost out to The Hand That Signed the Paper, a Holocaust story that later turned out to have been written by an Englishwoman who had borrowed the details from a Ukrainian neighbour in Brisbane.

For someone who has been reading and reviewing Flanagan for years now, these massed disadvantages have come to seem closer to a treasure trove. Like one of his great literary heroes, William Faulkner, Flanagan has emerged from an ostensibly backward, agrarian region, subordinate after independent beginnings. Both Flanagan’s Tasmania and Faulkner’s American south carry a stain in their collective past, yet writers from those regions hold the advantage of being able to write from somewhere closer to the ground zero of life. Flanagan and Faulkner were obliged to start from first principles, and it shows.

When I first put this association to Richard, he agreed but also drew a more sophisticated bead on the argument: “Literary culture,” he wrote to me, “constantly forgets that literature, from Flaubert in Normandy to Joyce in Trieste to Faulkner in Oxford to Marquez in Mexico City to Bolano in a Catalan caravan park, is the vengeance of the edges on the centre.” For him Tasmania is not some benighted outpost but a distinct region awaiting its voice: “Since Dante elevated vulgar Tuscan into the high form of Italian with his Divine Comedy, a language is not a dialect with a navy, but a dialect with a poet.”

Throughout the two decades and five novels that have followed that debut, Flanagan has hewed to a sense of respect and admiration for Faulkner’s lessons. He stayed in Tasmania and he has largely set his narratives on the island. He has at times suffered from a mainland parochialism that viewed his decision to do so as a refusal to depart some geographical ghetto. Likewise, as anyone who has picked up his remarkable fourth novel, Wanting — which moves between the story of Mathinna, an indigenous girl adopted by Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin in 19th-century Van Diemen’s Land and that of Charles Dickens, performing his genius at the centre of the Victorian world — will know, Flanagan follows Faulkner in his insistence that narratives emerging from the most marginal spaces, dealing with the smallest of events, can still claim universal significance.

Finally though, beyond Flanagan’s audacious experiments in coupling experimentalism in contemporary literature with what he calls the “baroque rhythms” of everyday Australian speech, there was a sense, which has reached a kind of culmination in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, that it is the world of literature in which one discovers the local space of home.

Like Flanagan’s schoolteacher father Archie, Dorrigo Evans, reluctant hero of Narrow Road, is a creature built from books. Both men memorised great swaths of 19th-century poetry, and both presumably were aided in their survival on the Thai-Burma Railway by recourse to the thousands of lines of Tennyson and Shelley lodged between their ears. Flanagan has claimed that he first discovered Tasmania via Faulkner’s Mississippi, and that it was this understanding that aided him during the years when his work was gently denigrated as regional.

What we should recognise in this, the week when Flanagan has broken through to a global readership, is that the Tasmanian has never written for his country in a parochial sense. He has instead followed his hero and written of the world he knows.

Richard has spoken of his admiration for Faulkner’s lifelong refusal to write an “American” novel. Well, we should equally celebrate Flanagan’s refusal to write an “Australian” novel. Much as Narrow Road speaks for our nation and its wartime experience, the true universality of his writing lies in its resolutely local limits.