The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Random House Australia Pty Ltd

©1997; 2018

 

 

 

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Penguin Random House Australia

©2013; 2018

 

Angry Penguins Abandon Hope

Dorrigo Evans, the son of a railway fettler and grandson of a famous Dorrigo, NSW, bushranger’s sidekick, has emerged from humble beginnings in Cleveland, Tasmania, to become a surgeon. On the first Tuesday of November, 1940, steeped in the works of “Victorian poets and the writers of antiquity” and based at the Warradale, South Australia, army camp, twenty-six-year-old Dorrigo wanders into a bookshop off Rundle Street, Adelaide, filled with modernists he’s “unable to make head or tail of”.

He falls down a rabbit hole into a mediaeval realm where the monarchy has been restored and cause and effect is relegated to the sidelines in favour of teleological archetypes and alchemy – a worldview where microcosmic patterns reflect macrocosmic events, where Alec Hope and other members of the literary old guard seek to hold the fort against the modernist Angry Penguins just as Verdi’s traditionalist ‘La Traviata’ was challenged by Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’. Playing Virgil to our Dante, the novelist guides us to this pre-scientific outlook via uncanny coincidence; i.e., via the trickster archetype: while in the bookshop where the modernists are launching their broadside against the traditionalists Dorrigo is approached by Isolde masquerading as Alexandre Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias; they discover that “Love is two bodies with one soul”.

Dorrigo is subsequently compelled to shed his Tristan skin and embark on an odyssey in which he has to suffer through the first circle of Dante’s Inferno and its horrors as the Commanding Officer of his fellow Australian POWs who, like their slave-driving military prison guards, are reduced to being instruments of the Japanese Emperor’s will.

Dorrigo emerges from that horrifying underworld and is eventually hailed as a celebrated WWII hero. But his soul has been destroyed – not by Fortuna as he imagines – but by Mendacius. Being a hero is nothing but another tiresome duty. His real life is the odyssey – a journey that demands one navigate safe passage between Scylla and Charibdis toward what the celebrated seventeenth-century Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho calls the ‘everlasting self’.

The title of Flanagan’s novel is taken from Basho. Like Basho and Tennyson’s Ulysses (Odysseus), Dorrigo wants to put the trappings of being a model citizen aside and get down to the essence of the self. But the real world in which the Australian war hero as well as his Japanese prison guards have to operate is a class-ridden society where those born on the lower rungs have the odds stacked against them by their fellow man. Dorrigo might have climbed the ladder and been lauded by the ruling class but is tricked – deliberately thwarted from reunion with his soul-mate – by liars in high places.