"Well that cracked my heart open "

"“My father was a Japanese POW who worked as a slave labourer on the Death Railway, a crime against humanity that saw more people die than the bomb killed at either Nagasaki or Hiroshima. If Basho’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is rightly celebrated as one of the high points of Japanese culture, my father’s experience was of one of its lowest. 

It is for readers and God to judge, but for the novelist only to point. To escape the error of judgement, I sought to use the forms and tropes of Japanese literature �� which I love �� to help in the futile but necessary task of seeking to divine the undivinable. Murder, hate and horror are as deeply buried in the human heart as love and beauty, perhaps more so, and in truth they’re rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you’d be missing what was most important and human.��
~ Richard Flanagan Booker Prizes interview

It’s a little mysterious how books find us when they find us. Or a writer.

I’ve had a tattered copy of Richard Flanagan’s “The Sound of One Hand Clapping�� on my shelves since 1997 and never got to it. It must have been on the receiving end of water, the bottom of the pages are hardened into curls that look like a snail’s paper shell.

“The Narrow Road to the Deep North�� is a dizzying, stupefying book.

A virtuosic, visceral and heartbreaking work of art that circles around the blinding light of love and the horrors of war with a Rashomon effect, melding multiple points of view in one song of humanity.

A novel that explodes our sense of time as linear and embraces life as a circular force, interweaving past, present and future in a feat of narrative tension that I’ve rarely felt so alive on the page.

Flanagan is famously fascinated by the existence of a “fourth tense�� used by the Yolngu Indigenous people of Australia, a tense that suggests past, present and future happening simultaneously, creating an entirely different way of relating to the world and our place in it.

The idea of such a tense has allowed Flanagan to create an unforgettable cast of characters as they venture out, from the quiet moments of uneventful years to the heightened epicenters that shape an existence, rising and receding like the tide in the *neverendingness* of things.

The journey is harrowing and it will wreck your heart. But there were scenes in this novel that are among the most beautiful that I have ever read.

What else are we here for?"

Rohan Wolsey is currently reading The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1)