In the great forests beyond, the devils and quolls and possums and potaroos and wombats and wallabies also came to curious life in the night, and they roamed the earth for what little they could scavenge to keep themselves alive, and when they mistakenly ventured onto the new gravel roads that were everywhere invading their world, it was to be mesmerised by the sudden shock of moving electric light that rendered them no longer an element of the great forests or plains, but a poor pitiful creature alone whose fate it was to be crushed between rubber and metal. There are few writers of contemporary literary fiction that can deliver at this level, something a review like this can certainly attest but by all rights demands to be heard in Flanagan’s own voice: After it is done, there remains a powerful urge to read it through again.
And yet …Īnd yet the quality of the prose never disappoints warts-and-all this is a novel that generously rewards the reader for patience and loyalty to the narrative. On more than one occasion there is the thud of the anticlimactic dully falling flat. It can be slow-going, especially because the elements that make you want to care about the characters are not fully fleshed out until the last third of the book. There are portions that seem extraneous and beg for edit. ** One Hand Clapping seems rougher and less sophisticated than River Guide. Flanagan’s first novel was the magnificent Death of a River Guide, which was no doubt a hard act to follow. The Sound of One Hand Clapping has much of the feel of a first novel, although it is not. But there is here, as in all of Flanagan’s fiction, an abundance of fine prose as well as a masterful use of the objective correlative–a literary device that conjures emotion in the inanimate–often seen in the works of Hemingway and Garcia Marquez. There is just a hint of the magical realism later manifested Gould’s Book of Fish. This is a book of much tragedy, of much disappointment, yet also one of hope and redemption. Flourishing a technique reminiscent of André Brink in A Chain of Voices, Flanagan skillfully moves between moments in time without losing anchor to the present, exploring Sonja’s childhood and, significantly, Bojan’s young manhood, which smacks of memories littered with atrocities and corpses of Nazis and Slovenian partisans. The novel’s title–adapted from the famous Zen kōan–evokes the bleak narrative that marked the formative years of Sonja’s life, abandoned at three years old by a mother who disappears into a blizzard, and thereafter shuttled between various temporary households by her often alcoholic and sometimes violent father, Bojan Bojan, a Slovenian immigrant whose parenting ranges from adoration to abuse. The central character is Sonja Buloh, a strong but troubled woman in her late-thirties who returns to her birthplace in Tasmania. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a much earlier work, published in 1997. I have since read five of the six books Flanagan has written, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2014.
Originally published in 2001, I consider it the finest novel of the millennium to date. Think William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John Irving, all stirring the same pot with different shaped spoons.
My first encounter with Flanagan was Gould’s Book of Fish, a stunningly original and brilliant blend of satire, heartache, love, cruelty, comedy, and existential tragedy, tossed with a superb use of magical realism. And that is the art in the novels crafted by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan. That is not only fine writing: that is art. After the plot has faded, the names of the characters erased, and the book itself diminished by passing time into a sort of vague mental snapshot of its encounter, the way a great novel makes you feel while you read it cuts a kind of indelible groove that resonates long after the cover is closed. To my mind, great literature is best defined by the visceral reaction it triggers and its stubborn lingering effect.
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