Marta Bausells, Guardian
Pic: Matt Newton, http://www.matthewnewton.com.au/
Why a novel without structure is ‘a jellyfish pretending to be a shark’, and other secrets of the trade revealed by the Booker-winning author at a Guardian Live event on The Narrow Road to the Deep North
As extreme research goes, Richard Flanagan’s encounter with a former Japanese guard from the prison of war camp in which his father had been interned takes some beating. The encounter happened as he was working on his Man Booker prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Tasmanian author revealed at a Guardian book club event in London this week.
“For no clear reason, I asked him to slap me, which was the principal form of punishment in the imperial Japanese army,” he said. On receiving the third blow, the whole room started to twist up and down and roll widely, and he thought he’d lost his mind. In fact, a 7.3 Richter-scale earthquake had hit Tokyo.
In conversation with John Mullan, as part of the Guardian Live programme, the Tasmanian author promised it would be the last time he’d discuss his novel, featuring an Australian surgeon who unwittingly becomes a national hero for his courage in standing up to his Japanese captors. “I feel finally free,” he said, adding that writing about the “huge cosmos” that was left unsaid by his father, who had been held captive in Burma, had been enormously cathartic.
Here, Flanagan reflects on some of the things he has learned in a 30-year career that has produced six novels and five works of nonfiction as well as two films.
Story is everything
“To me, story is a rhythm that takes you along, and narrative is like a water sprinkler throwing things up everywhere – cliffhangers, unresolved loves, endless twists and turns,” he said. “But story is something more fundamental and oddly abstract,” he said.
“Story is everything. But it is is not dependent on proceeding in that chronological way.” Flanagan believes that’s not really how we understand ourselves, or the world around us. “We always have some understanding of an ending, but it’s trying to understand how we came to that point that consumes us.”
All the great love stories are death stories
“In the end, the only answer we have to politics, to power, to horror, is the love we might know for each other. It’s not a full answer, it’s not the basis for anything, but it is all we have. Perhaps it is in that spirit that I wrote the book,” said Flanagan.
“Love stories demand death,” he added. “Love doesn’t have rules, but love stories do, and one is that there has to be death, because we understand instinctively the great psychological and spiritual truth of love, which is that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after; love’s always transitory and also transcendent. In story terms that means you have to have a death. All the great love stories are death stories.”
