Simon Bevilacqua Mercury, Saturday November 1. Outspoken author Richard Flanagan speaks about his new book Wanting.
He reveals that an Englishwoman like Lady Jane must repress desire and deny wanting to divorce herself from the “savage” within. Her bid to force Mathinna to wear shoes is part of the black girl’s “civilisation”. “Our lives are a war waged between bare feet and the wooden frames that seek to imprison them, and we walk through the rubble of that war all our lives,” Flanagan explained. The distorted and perverted behaviour resulting from repression is revealed by Flanagan without judgment. “This book doesn’t have a message because what I think you discover when you write stories is in the end you’re just there to reflect what truth you can find in this life, not to try to pretend how life should be lived. I don’t even know how to live my own life,” Flanagan said. “In a novel you’re allowed to open yourself to the chaos of what we are. It’s hard to admit all the contradictions we’re made of. We may believe this thing one moment and abandon it and believe the opposite the next. We can believe one thing, act another way and say a third. “What you discover as a writer is you’re not one person. There’s an infinity of people in you, some much more admirable, others much more despicable.”
RICHARD Flanagan is a complex character. He speaks with a thick Tasmanian drawl that he admits has drawn comment in literary circles in Sydney and Melbourne.
Some authors speak with plums in their mouths, Flanagan sounds more like a North-West Tasmanian dairy farmer. He has a rural delivery; slow, precise and disconcertingly to the point. Few people in the world can say as much in so few words as a North-West farmer, Flanagan is one of them.
But behind the bullocky growl and agricultural pace is a mind that has thrived on an expansive education and been soaked in books.
Born in Longford in northern Tasmania and raised in Rosebery in the west, Flanagan was studying history at the University of Tasmania when awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.
At 24, he flew to England to study at Oxford University, an ancient institution which has produced 25 British prime ministers, three Australian prime ministers — John Gorton, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke — and writers Lewis Carroll, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde and J.R.R. Tolkien.
“I was terrified I’d be exposed as a fraud and they’d work out it was one big mistake,” Flanagan recalls.
But Flanagan, whose hick-town heritage appeared to pale against his Oxford colleagues, adopted the creed of another islander faced with the best the British could muster — West Indian cricket legend Lord Leary Constantine.
A black man in a white world, Constantine faced racism in Lancashire in the 1930s when blacks were expected to avoid white districts. West Indian journalist C.L.R. James reminded Constantine: “We are no less than they.”
The West Indian captain became a cricket great, was knighted and made a life peer.
Flanagan, who met James in south-east Brixton, adopted the same proud and defiant attitude. “Eventually, I found my Tasmanian background gave me something no one else had,” Flanagan said.
Flanagan returned from the intellectual rigour of Oxford to be a builders’ labourer in Tasmania. Over summer, he worked as a guide on the Franklin River — inspiring his first novel Death Of A River Guide.
He has since produced The Sound Of One Hand Clapping (which he also directed as a film), Gould’s Book Of Fish and The Unknown Terrorist.
Tomorrow is the launch of his fifth novel Wanting.
He is feted by literati and spends half his time on book tours in the US, South-East Asia and Europe where he is fawned over and parades about with pop stars and movie stars. He helped Baz Luhrmann on the soon-to-be-released epic film Australia. The Aussie director recently dined at Flanagan’s West Hobart house.
It says something about the complexity of Flanagan’s character that he admits feeling at home in the flash, glittery world of stardom. He feeds on rush, vigour and hype. He is stimulated by cities, conversation and the unexpected that comes with travel.
He wrote most of The Unknown Terrorist in three months under the patronage of 82-year-old Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori in her Santa Maddalena writers’ retreat in a medieval tower in Donnini, Italy.
Salman Rushdie, Juliette Binoche, Isabella Rossellini and John Malkovich have visited the 15th century signal tower and wandered through the olive groves, oaks and chestnuts that line the Tuscan paths.
Despite his glamorous international life, Flanagan retains the larrikin humour and earthy values of a bush poet. He often flees to his Bruny Island shack, a modest vertical board affair built by a Captain Fazackerly in the 1940s and still decorated in the style of the day, with parquetry picture frames housing portraits of vessels. An old wireless over the fireplace broadcasts cricket, not Bradman as it probably once did, but the deeds of Tassie’s Ricky Ponting.
Flanagan, 47, is at ease chopping wood for the fire, drinking a dark ale on the deck overlooking D’Entrecasteaux Channel and bursting into raucous laughter at tales about disrespectful, resident quolls urinating on guests from inside the roof cavity.
He suits the 1940s ambience of “Captain Zacks”, as Flanagan’s 17-year-old identical twin daughters Jean and Eliza dubbed the shack.
Flanagan’s wife Majda, 20-year-old daughter Rosie and the twins often holiday on Bruny.
Flanagan wrote Gould’s Book Of Fish in the front study to the sound of Van Morrison’s 1968 folk/rock masterpiece Astral Weeks and in view of wattle birds in she-oaks, banksias and grass trees.
THERE are many contradictions in Flanagan. His roles as husband, father, academic, intellectual, film director, activist, Tassie-boy-made-good, shackie, labourer, author and kayaker rub against each other and create tension that he tries to resolve by, as he puts it, “being true”.
He often talks of truth — not the Platonic ideal of an absolute truth, but a simple, instinctive truth about the honesty with which we perceive the world and ourselves.
Perhaps it is this quest for truth and examination of his own tangled character that gives him such insight, and acceptance, of the characters he creates in his novels.
In Wanting, Flanagan characterises historical figures such as Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John Franklin and Charles Dickens. His characters are fictional, not historically accurate.
But his expose of Lady Jane denying her motherly instincts for her adopted Aboriginal girl Mathinna is disturbingly believable — and his portrayal of Sir John as a pedophile failing to repress his lust for his black stepdaughter even more upsetting.
When Mathinna is killed by a fellow Aborigine it is uncomfortable. When George Augustus Robinson, often regarded a destroyer of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, dies happy and content it is unnerving.
Flanagan’s ambitious attempt to bring Dickens to life made even his publisher nervous. Dickens, after all, is one of the greatest character writers.
Flanagan’s characters, their motivations and internal conflicts, are complicated. His Dickens, Lady Jane and Sir John live in the moral grey with the rest of us.
He reveals that an Englishwoman like Lady Jane must repress desire and deny wanting to divorce herself from the “savage” within. Her bid to force Mathinna to wear shoes is part of the black girl’s “civilisation”.
“Our lives are a war waged between bare feet and the wooden frames that seek to imprison them, and we walk through the rubble of that war all our lives,” Flanagan explained.
The distorted and perverted behaviour resulting from repression is revealed by Flanagan without judgment.
“This book doesn’t have a message because what I think you discover when you write stories is in the end you’re just there to reflect what truth you can find in this life, not to try to pretend how life should be lived. I don’t even know how to live my own life,” Flanagan said.
“In a novel you’re allowed to open yourself to the chaos of what we are. It’s hard to admit all the contradictions we’re made of. We may believe this thing one moment and abandon it and believe the opposite the next. We can believe one thing, act another way and say a third.
“What you discover as a writer is you’re not one person. There’s an infinity of people in you, some much more admirable, others much more despicable.”
