Richard Flanagan's incredible The Narrow Road to the Deep North

In this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers. 
Issa

This novel is an extraordinary achievement from Australian novelist Richard Flanagan. Quite simply it is root and branch astonishing. A powerful, rich, gut-wrenching masterpiece.

It stands head and shoulders above most novels I have read over the last few years, so I make this prediction with confidence: this novel will be short listed for next year's Miles Franklin, the Prime Ministers award AND THE BOOKER and could well win all three. 

Flanagan has gone right to the edge here. It's a novel not just about love and war. It explores the very extremes of those human realities.

Some reviewers will tell you this is a novel about war hero Weary Dunlop. It's not. It's much, much more than that. Anchored in historical events and personalities, it fashions and transcends them with exquisite artistry, exploring the deepest meanings and dimensions of our shared human plight. Weary Dunlop is a skeleton around which Flanagan sculptures a masterful work of depth and majesty. 'The strange terrible neverendingness of human beings'.


The novel conveys the lived experience of the construction of the Thai Burma railway with enormous and relentless emotional power. The reader is plunged unsparingly into the horror of the POW camps and the extremity of human evil: 'the hideous labour, the beatings, the torture'. It's visceral stuff and not for the squeamish.

If there is such a thing as male/female polarity, then this novel is about as masculine as you can get. It's tough, grimy, unforgiving, but written in the most lyrical of prose.

If you're at all a sentient human being then it will shake you to your bootstraps and frequently bring you to tears. 

After the war there is the reckoning - with justice, normalcy, reality. The touching scene of the mates visiting Mr Nikitaris' fish shop in honor of their dead friend brought me to tears.

The utter inability of the Weary Dunlop character, Dorrigo Evans, to adapt to domesticity, and of the Japanese camp warden Nakamura to bed his inner turmoil is sympathetically told. Hell dogged them. Forged in the deep, they couldn't thrive in the shallows. They're damaged men, as if emerged from the darkest netherworld.

There's a Dickensian dimension to the narrative - a lost baby, horrendous fires, lies and misunderstandings, coincidental sightings, and the aristocratic Evans and his public duties. But all these plot points add richness to the ultimate meaning and profundity of this incredible work.

'For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boots and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.' (p307)

David Marr's Quarterly Essay on George Pell

This QE is Marr's fourth, and it is easily his best. Which surprises me, Marr not being a Catholic or believer, etc. But that's probably why he's been able to assess Pell clearly and objectively, just based on the extensive research he's obviously done.

He focuses on Pell's handling of the sexual abuse crisis in the church over decades, and very effectively brings all the threads together to produce a damning indictment. Believe me, this QE will make you angry!

Beautifully written and well worth reading.

Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries

Right from the start you know this is going to be a good read. A faux 19th century big baggy monster set in an exotic location. It reminded me very much of the awesome David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas and Jacob de Zoet fame.

How can a 27 year old produce such a mature, luscious, intriguing story, rich in social detail and human insight.

It's long though, because of the constant repetition involved with so many characters going through the same discovery process around the same set of incidents. This means regular recounting of the story to remind the reader what's taken place previously. It's really not that complicated a plot, centered around a gold heist, but flesh is added to the bones progressively, and by the end it's become a rich and satisfying feast indeed.


Most of the 12 luminaries also suffer from extreme verbosity, and there are plenty of back stories. So we're faced with a novel of 832 pages, and one that demands close reading and concentration. As well, Catton has a habit of subjecting all her characters to lengthy  psychological assessments. Here I think she's trying a bit too hard.

It becomes somewhat claustrophobic and burdened by detail but nevertheless it does deftly convey in microcosm the moral, social, economic and political pressure points of a small but thriving mid-19th century community. The luminaries, eminent citizens, are a fascinating, representative mix - one even a whoremonger, another an opium dealer.

I enjoyed this absorbing novel immensely. It's quite magnificent. Of all the novels shortlisted this deserves to win the Booker. If the judges give the prize to sentimental favorite Jim Crace's rather lightweight Harvest, then the Booker deserves to be swamped by Americans in the future. 

Jim Crace's new novel is the Booker favorite apparently. It's set in an English peasant farming community in pre-modern, pre-literate times. 

Superficially it's a simple pastoral tale - 'the amity in everything' - but soon develops into a story of violent social upheaval.Economic 'progress' brings personal and communal disruption, conflict, brutality and revenge. 'Witches' are outed, outsiders are blamed, banished and pilloried, and former friends suddenly become enemies for no real reason.

The problem I have with the book is that these themes are not new. There's nothing original here. The writing is strong, muscular and poetic, particularly in its descriptions of nature in all its moods, but there is little reach into deeper, more resonant meanings. There are no surprises, no dramatic shifts, nothing to break the calm, measured progress of the narrative. It's a book that will not stay with you.

I find that disappointing, particularly in a year when JM Coetzee's extraordinary The Childhood of Jesus did not even make the long list. That remains a travesty.

At first I thought Cairo was going to be a pretty standard 'Sophisticated Europe/Provincial Australia' narrative. Louche arty types, whiskied up, railing against their boring, backward country. It's a familiar trope. Germaine Greer stuff - you may have heard of her.

But it's not that at all. It's a pretty standard action drama built around a true crime that took place in Melbourne in 1986 - the heist of Picasso's Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria.

Womersley has created out of this an absorbing popular tale. It's written with enormous charm and style, without pretension, and peopled with lively characters.

The problem is it falls well short of its literary and imaginative promise. Inspired by an actual event it remains anchored to it, and never has the chance to take off as a more probing, socially critical literary effort. 

And it desperately needed a final 'Thirty Years Later' chapter.

Womersley's previous multi-award winning novel Bereft was far more accomplished. But read Cairo nevertheless. It's hugely enjoyable.

An Empty, Meandering Failure of a Prize Winner

This novel is a multiple prize winner and for the life of me I cannot understand why. It won this year's Miles Franklin and the Prime Ministers Award.

It's an empty, meandering failure. I was profoundly irritated by the clotted prose, the passive voice and the constant sloppy use of the wrong word just because it sounded edgy or novel.

It tells the separate stories of two main characters Laura and Ravi. They left me cold, as did the hundreds of other minor characters introduced every second page. The whole thing is a mess. It's a very labored 500 page trawl through these characters' travels and travails. Whatever plot there is lurches forward with grinding tedium. Sure, Australia is sunny, suburban, peaceful, multicultural, but with sad and violent personal histories threaded into its immigrant tapestry. But no larger exploration of meaning is being attempted, at least as far as I could tell.

De Kretser writes like a painter paints - constant dabs of 'there was', 'there were' - adding some descriptive color but not propelling the narrative. Pages and pages are clogged with this sort of impressionistic stuff. Touristy bric-a-brac - a bit of this, a bit of that, all mashed together.

And the ending is entirely predictable - it's Sri Lanka in December 2004. Have a guess!

Catholics and Gay Marriage

Two things firstly:

1. I deeply respect the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly in its Catholic expression. I spent six and a half years in a Catholic seminary including four years in Rome, so I know something about it.

2. I am in favor of gay marriage.

Although the Catholic church will never grant gay marriage equality, it should grant it recognition.

Gay marriage is an issue for the secular state. The church doesn't own the term 'marriage', much less the legal architecture surrounding it.

The official Catholic position is that the sacrament of marriage, in its 'fullness', can by definition only be between a man and a woman, as only such a union is fundamentally 'open' to the pro-creation and nurturing of children. (Concepts such as fullness and openness have a long history in Catholic thought.) 

But Catholics can believe in the primacy of heterosexual marriage without resorting to a mindless denigration of gay marriage. In fact surveys show that a majority of Catholics are of that persuasion.

Catholic thinking on homosexuality, like contraception, is still very immature. Orthodox moral theology demonises the 'sin' as ontologically evil, but forgives the 'sinner'. This means the church has a long way to go before it will even come close to embracing  gay unions, much less celebrating them liturgically. 

But, at a minimum, surely the church can privilege heterosexual marriage as a matter of belief while supporting the state's absolute right to legislate otherwise.

There is no conceptual conflict on other issues of faith and morals like divorce and abortion which the state allows in specific circumstances and Catholic belief doesn't.

Christendom is long gone. We live in a secular, pluralistic, tolerant, multi-faith society, ironically a gift of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is no longer realistic for Christians to expect, much less demand, that society honour without qualification their particular belief and value system.

Believing in religious freedom also means believing in the legislative freedom of the secular state. The church can organise, protest, lobby and persuade, but it cannot de-legitimise. 


Perhaps one day, after an adult church abolishes celibacy and ordains women and the openly gay, it will find itself ready to celebrate and embrace gay unions, thus honouring the deep love and public commitment of the participants. 

I'm not one of those who believe this will never happen. The Holy Spirit resides in the people, and the people will eventually have their way.