Richard Flanagan: “To be true is the work of writing”

I don’t want to say this in a rude way but that’s the wrong way to phrase it. For me, stories are a way to find and uncover the truth, a way to remove the fog and see what’s really out there. I believe that fiction succeeds at asking the right questions while failing when it thinks it has the answers. Politics and religion offer answers. And they also take us through times of great crisis and suffering.

I wrote this book from the novelist part of me. I’ve worked in journalism and history and it demands a different side of you. To do your job (referring to the interviewer) you have to move outward. You report on what you touch, feel, hear and see, to the extent that you offer a commentary that makes it clear that it is an opinion different from what you touched, felt, heard and saw. But for this book, I wanted to reach into my own soul and try to ask the right questions about certain things.

I have always known that my existence is only because of this terrible crime against humanity (the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). So, for most of my adult life, I’ve read a lot about it and thought about it even more, trying to understand why it happened. We’re always presented with it as a story of one scientific discovery that leads to another, but what I show in this book is that it also begins with stories, from one American research project becoming the Manhattan Project, to the bomb falling on Hiroshima, and that’s why I’m here talking to you. It all starts with an imagination.

There are many reasons why I wrote this book, but one of them is that there is a tendency in the world today to think that only numbers tell us the truth. However, I think it is these stories that get to the heart of ‘who’ and what we are, if we choose to listen to them carefully so that we can think about them and what they mean to us.

Question 7 The structure is very similar to the chain reaction that Szilárd thought about. The book begins with your father’s life, quickly moves to the passionate romance between HG Wells and Rebecca West, and similarly, breaks away from the binary way of telling personal stories.

I think we live in a true fantasy where we think we create ourselves. We don’t see that we are imprisoned and sometimes freed by stories that are much older than us, and that these stories can sometimes be terrible, and they can sometimes be sublime. But once we see and understand them, they allow us to act differently and become who we really need to be and want to be.

The second thing is that today is an age that celebrates this idea of ​​numbers and metrics, and we’re told that’s the only way to define the world. But if we think more about our stories, perhaps they contain wisdom that is more relevant and practical than what a binary code could tell us about ourselves. I think one of the dilemmas we face today is that we allow a binary code to dictate who we are. We are trapped and lost within algorithms, which are determined and shaped entirely by the needs of profit. And to avoid this, we must look at the bigger stories we live within ourselves, and we must strive to create better stories.

“Somewhere there was a real world where everything that passed continued to exist.” You look at this about nuclear bombings, and it seems like what’s happening in Gaza is proof of that. It also reminds me of the writers protesting against Adelaide Writers Week over Randa Abdel-Fattah’s exclusion.

Absolutely. I think without the bomb we wouldn’t have Gaza.

I think one can agree or disagree with the Palestinian author’s point of view, but she should be allowed to be heard. 70,000 of his people have died. Someone should be allowed to speak for them.

Overall, the writers, who are being told that they are so useless that they will be replaced by machines, and for whom coming to a festival like this (Jaipur) or Adelaide is a high point, still had the insight to recognize that next time, it might not be a Palestinian, it might be someone who stands up for some social or environmental issue. Writers are a very diverse group of people with many beliefs and ideas. But what the writers did in this case impressed me a lot and after that I felt a certain pride in calling myself a writer.

You notice your father saying, “There’s no one left to tell.” Are you faced with the dilemma of whether you should tell a particular story?

I don’t think you can allow yourself to be bound by those thoughts. The language of responsibility, morality and ethics cannot be applied to art. Art exists in a realm separate from morality and ethics.

If you want to write something true and you feel obligated or obligated not to write anything, your writing will fail. Of course, you should try to respect people and not hurt them. That matters. But ultimately, it is not the job of writing to be ethical or responsible. The task of writing is to be truthful and not boring. Only two things matter. That’s it. But if you forget it, you’re done.

We turn to art to discover what we share with other people. We could be murderers. We can be a saint. Or a holy man. We have all these possibilities, from being the most beautiful to being the most terrible. Circumstances have made you (pointing to the interviewer) a journalist and me a writer. But in another world, we might as well be monsters. So, the job of art is to travel into your soul and (help you) discover not just who you are, but what you share with others. Ultimately, when you succeed you discover that you are not an individual but infinite, and you write from that infinite.

I don’t think it’s a mysterious idea, because I think everyone knows it, but only in rare moments of great sadness or physical ecstasy. But then they have to put it back in a box and live their lives like me or you and pretend and go back to projecting this one identity, which is definitely not who we are.

Your first novel, death of a river guideWas based on your experience of almost drowning. In question 7, you remember this clearly, noting that often an author retells the same story. By playing with fact and fiction, were you trying to find a middle ground between what happened or could happen?

This is a big idea. I will have to think about it.

I think what that experience gave me was my life. A life ended there. I think the life I have lived since then has been a dream. And in that dream, I realized that only a few things matter. Kindness, goodness, love and respecting others in whatever way you can are perhaps the most important and necessary things you can do.

While Booker’s win would have given you more readership, with Baillie Gifford’s win, you decided to decline the money. Many writers might not have taken this step.

Booker was a disaster of good fortune (laughs). I think that describes it. You can only be grateful, but it’s a strange experience.

Why did I decline the Baillie Gifford Prize money? That’s a matter between me and my soul, but I think it’s terrible to set these things as moral examples because then it becomes a form of moral blackmail.

In my example, the book I won talks specifically about the immense sadness I feel about what climate change is doing to the island where I come from. I find this extremely sad and wrong. I felt I was in an impossible situation. I could not have written this book nor taken the money if it had come from that source. But it was a complicated situation, because the people who donated the money weren’t the worst people. He had good intentions. I thought it also mattered, the way I said no, allowed them their dignity and showed respect, because, in a way, we are all caught up in this horror. I am here (in Jaipur) only because I flew in a plane and released tons of carbon into the atmosphere. We’re all in cars. We are all putting carbon into the atmosphere and destroying the world we need to survive. None of us are innocent in this. I felt I had no choice, but I am not at all morally pure in this matter.

What kind of authors did you read growing up?

I always regret when I answer this question, because there are so many writers who mean something to me. And every time I start making a list, I realize I’ve forgotten some of them. When I was young, it was (Franz) Kafka, (William) Faulkner, Latin American, Russian, French. (Albert) Camus was very important to me.

But as a writer you have your own needs. You need to discover your world. Some authors explain your world to you better than others. But I was not particularly interested in English writers because they seemed to be the voice of the ruling power. This doesn’t mean that British writers aren’t wonderful writers, they just weren’t the writers I needed or that mattered to me. It seems to me that the writing of other colonized countries suffered from the terror of empire. Those were the ones I found revelatory.

Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. She can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.