Death of a River Guide

[vaneramos]

Home with a cold this afternoon I curled up in front of the gas fireplace and finished reading Death of a River Guide, the first novel by Richard Flanagan, which I've been savouring over lunch hours for the past few weeks. It came as a housewarming gift from smileyfish along with two boxes of blended tea. Book and beverage are redolent of her home in Tasmania.

Death of a River Guide uses the visions of a drowning man to recount forgotten, essential episodes of his Tasmanian heritage. He becomes privy to intimate conversations, pilgrimages, delusions, blind prejudices, desperate acts and heinous crimes. He lives the deaths of his ancestors. The story serves to illustrate his early observation, "that we know a great deal more about ourselves than we ever normally care to admit, except at the great moments of truth in our life, in love and hate, at birth and death," but that our rational minds serve to guide us on a voyage away from these truths.

It is beautifully written, vividly evoking 19th and early 20th Century life in Tasmania. It evolved as a penal colony where convicts were debased and forgotten, but Aboriginal people were worse off, rounded up and housed under the floorboards where criminals pissed and shit. Throughout the history flows the inexorable current of the Franklin River in which the man will meet his fate.

Unique and remarkable is the way Flanagan shifts deftly between points of view. The dying man narrates, however his stories shift freely from first person to third person accounts of his former self (he is at once storyteller and a discrete character in his stories), to visions through the eyes of deceased relatives he never knew, to episodes described by fantasy creatures. It presents a compelling theory of a dying man's intense, unravelling psychic energy. With this technique the writer expertly bends and breaks rules of narrative, and I am awestruck that he was able to pull it off so convincingly, so powerfully. Forgive me for pointing out and perhaps spoiling the effect for readers who would rather not be distracted by technique, but I am impressed.

This will find a place on my shelf of favourite novels. I'm delighted to see Flanagan has gone on to write four more novels garnering international acclaim. I look forward to reading some of them, too.

Comments

[changeling72.livejournal.com]

Sounds fascinating.

[smileyfish.livejournal.com]

I am so very pleased you liked it! It's one of my favourites, and my favourite Flanagan (though I adored Gould's Book of Fish, it also did my head in and required a few dictionary referalls).

I'm rather anticipating my trip down the Franklin over Christmas-New Year.