This will hurt me...

Looking down over Hobart, kunanyi/ Mt Wellington. May 2021. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan As I continue to haphazardly wind my way through Richard Flanagan's oeuvre, I turn towards his Booker Prize-winning  The Narrow Road to the Deep North . A book of many distinct parts, I felt the standout section was Book Three, detailing life in the Japanese prisoner of war camps with the Sisyphean task of building a railway in the jungle with no food, equipment or (for many) the hope of an ending. Other elements - mainly those centring the love affair between Dorrigo Evans and Amy - I found overly sentimental and unconvincing. Given the internal struggle within Dorrigo, his outward bravery, and generosity juxtaposed with a cold and clinical relationship with his wife and children, the constant return to Amy felt a little forced and false. I could have also done without the twist and reveal of the connection between Dorrigo and poor old Darky Gardiner towards the end. ...

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 ...

  Seagull on a chimney (I know, I know, it's serious), Hobart, March 2021. Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish   by Richard Flanagan Where to start with this odd beast? We start with a caution that our (initial) narrator cannot be trusted. From here, we enter into his reconstruction of a text that our untrustworthy narrator warns is one of another unreliable narrator. Master Gould (sic) is most insistent in his testimony that the reader cannot trust his account. In this remarkable and peculiar novel, Flanagan explores the nature of memory, history and the very grand stories that individuals and nations console themselves. What is 'true' much depends upon who is asking and what is it they wish to hear. In this, the history of Van Diemen's Land presents exceptional fodder. More succinctly, it is a tale of a bullshitter. The narrator is a bullshitter in love with bullshitting. In that, he understands that bullshit is all that we can ever have. From here, the r...