The Age Richard Flanagan has no qualms about using historical characters but that doesn’t make his new book a historical novel, he tells Jason Steger
At the heart of Wanting is what Flanagan describes as a meditation about desire and the terrible costs of trying to control that wanting by reason. The epigraph of the novel is from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground that “reason is only reason and satisfied only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life”. The links between the surprising cast of characters are established in a careful structure. (Flanagan recalls Hemingway attacking Aldous Huxley: novels are architecture, not interior decoration.) Mathinna is taken up by the Franklins. Subsequently Franklin disappears in the Arctic ice on his search for the North-West Passage and his wife wants to repair a reputation sullied by the suggestions of cannibalism. Dickens agrees to write a pamphlet attacking that calumny. Then the great writer stages a play in which he appears as a man who sacrifices his life to allow the woman he loves to be with another man. And in the course of the run, Dickens falls in love with the 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan. “How often it is that we have to do violence to our feelings,” Flanagan has Dickens tell his friend and biographer, John Forster, “and hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life, so we can bravely discharge our duties and responsibilities.” The novel began with an image, a painting of Mathinna that Flanagan saw in a Hobart museum when he was 20. The curator showed him the little Aboriginal girl in a red dress but then lifted the frame to show the bare feet that lay under it. It resonated with him because it “was this odd combination of the dress of the Age of Reason over an Aboriginal child at the end of what I knew had been this terrible war of extermination. Really, it’s the bare feet chopped off by the wooden frame”. He felt that within that image was a universe of emotion, a war that went on forever between wooden frames and bare feet; between reason and passion and how we spend all our lives trying to find some path, some peace in the rubble that results. Read more here
Flanagan’s new book was launched spectacularly at the Polish Club, Hobart, yesterday by Leo Schofield and James McLeod With a bit of luck TT will have one or all of the speeches to publish.
