Why a novel without structure is ‘a jellyfish pretending to be a shark’, and other secrets of the trade revealed by the Booker-winning author at a Guardian Live event on The Narrow Road to the Deep North

As extreme research goes, Richard Flanagan’s encounter with a former Japanese guard from the prison of war camp in which his father had been interned takes some beating. The encounter happened as he was working on his Man Booker prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Tasmanian author revealed at a Guardian book club event in London this week.

“For no clear reason, I asked him to slap me, which was the principal form of punishment in the imperial Japanese army,” he said. On receiving the third blow, the whole room started to twist up and down and roll widely, and he thought he’d lost his mind. In fact, a 7.3 Richter-scale earthquake had hit Tokyo.

In conversation with John Mullan, as part of the Guardian Live programme, the Tasmanian author promised it would be the last time he’d discuss his novel, featuring an Australian surgeon who unwittingly becomes a national hero for his courage in standing up to his Japanese captors. “I feel finally free,” he said, adding that writing about the “huge cosmos” that was left unsaid by his father, who had been held captive in Burma, had been enormously cathartic.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan review – beauty, bathos and brilliance in equal measure Read more

Here, Flanagan reflects on some of the things he has learned in a 30-year career that has produced six novels and five works of nonfiction as well as two films.



Story is everything

“To me, story is a rhythm that takes you along, and narrative is like a water sprinkler throwing things up everywhere – cliffhangers, unresolved loves, endless twists and turns,” he said. “But story is something more fundamental and oddly abstract,” he said.

“Story is everything. But it is is not dependent on proceeding in that chronological way.” Flanagan believes that’s not really how we understand ourselves, or the world around us. “We always have some understanding of an ending, but it’s trying to understand how we came to that point that consumes us.”

To me, story is a rhythm that takes you along, and narrative is like a water sprinkler throwing things up everywhere

All the great love stories are death stories

“In the end, the only answer we have to politics, to power, to horror, is the love we might know for each other. It’s not a full answer, it’s not the basis for anything, but it is all we have. Perhaps it is in that spirit that I wrote the book,” said Flanagan.



“Love stories demand death,” he added. “Love doesn’t have rules, but love stories do, and one is that there has to be death, because we understand instinctively the great psychological and spiritual truth of love, which is that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after; love’s always transitory and also transcendent. In story terms that means you have to have a death. All the great love stories are death stories.”

Research is overrated

Apart from two Japanese camp guards, Flanagan didn’t interview anyone else for the book. He remembered doing a gig in Los Angeles with a “famous nameless” American author and about 2,000 earnest Californians. They asked the author how she researched, and Flanagan said it was exhausting to listen to - she’d set up oral history projects, databases, software.

She ended with a lot of applause – and, when the conductors turned to him to ask what he did for research, he said, “I’m Australian, we’re a bit lazy, we just make it up.” Not one of the 2,000 Californians laughed. But in the end, he said: “The monstrously evil is within us all, and it’s perhaps even closer to us than the things we’d rather we were – goodness, love, etc”. And the novelist’s role, Flanagan suggested, isn’t to go out into the world, but into ourselves to find it.

The chaos as at the heart of things

Flanagan believes that English-language culture has a bad habit of seeing literature as a moral guide that offers us guidance on how to live. “But literature cannot do that, it doesn’t do that,” he said. “It is of life, and part of life. And therefore it cannot escape life, and all it can do is remind us of the chaos at the heart of things, and in that chaos remind us that we’re not alone.”

You shouldn’t look for morality in literature

“It is a mistake to confuse literature with morality. It exists beyond it,” Flanagan continued. “But I think because we live in this great [Christian] tradition, there’s always been a confusion and a desire – and you see it most strongly in America, where you can never be forgiven for not having redemption in a novel – that the novel must conform to ideas of the Christian story. But literature is a different thing. Literature is life, not religion.”



...a novel without structure is a jellyfish pretending to be a shark.

A novel without structure is a jellyfish pretending to be a shark



Flanagan said the best way to describe his writing process is “as a three-dimensional object”. “I hear it. And then I try and render what I see and hear as story and character, as words. But it’s not primarily how I understand it.” After admitting that his explanation might seem “absurdly abstract”, he said: “I write from feeling, above all. But I try and give it structure, because a novel without structure is a jellyfish pretending to be a shark, and a novel must have form or it’s nothing.”





The moment you know everything about a character, you’ve created a caricature

“We hardly know ourselves – why we do things, what matters to us – and I think it’s a mistake in novels to be consistent, coherent, because lives are not,” Flanagan stated. “Novels add arguments. You see in some American fiction this idea that everything has to be totally explained in terms of motivation, and characters have to be entirely consistent, and the novelist knows everything about a character. But the moment you know everything about a character, you’ve created a caricature.”

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