“Not that Harry said any of these things or anything at all. Not that Harry even had words for what he thought. But Harry felt it and he felt it as a flame that consumed his body.”

The Tarn Shelf. Mount Field National Park, April 2021.

Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

A strange thing this, Flanagan's first novel. There are moments of sublime beauty in which the rugged Tasmanian west is at once a critical character as it the creator of life and deliverer of death. Beginning with the moment of local river guide Aljaz Cosini's death, the book unravels through a series of flashbacks, imaginings, visions and hallucinations.

From here, we travel backwards to Aljaz's birth, then further back to the births, lives and deaths of his forebears. From here, we jump back and forth across time and place, occasionally revisiting Alijaz in the split second of his death as the story plays out. Make no bones about it; the book can be hard going at times.

Filled with magical thinking and allusions to Tasmanian history's hard and dark tales, our narrator stands in place for the State. The mongrel stock of convict and free settler, of immigrant and a darker stain that is so often denied by the local, this book serves as both record and judgment of my home state.

As such, I think that it does a pretty good job. However, I can't help but wonder if Flanagan might make a different choice in his conflation and finding something approaching equivalence in the convict and Aboriginal experience in the year 2021. I am certain that I would have found such an approach much more palatable in 1994 than today, with a richer and more nuanced understanding of the crimes committed on the Palawa people. However terrible the horrors visited on the convicts that found their way to Van Diemen's Land, the hierarchy of atrocity seems clear.

That said, I like it very much! The lad clearly has a bright future in books.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2