“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

Comments

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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