“But literature cannot do that, it doesn’t do that,” he said. The chaos as at the heart of thingsįlanagan believes that English-language culture has a bad habit of seeing literature as a moral guide that offers us guidance on how to live. And the novelist’s role, Flanagan suggested, isn’t to go out into the world, but into ourselves to find it. 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”. 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. 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. He remembered doing a gig in Los Angeles with a “famous nameless” American author and about 2,000 earnest Californians. All the great love stories are death stories.” Research is overratedĪpart from two Japanese camp guards, Flanagan didn’t interview anyone else for the book. In story terms that means you have to have a death. “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. Perhaps it is in that spirit that I wrote the book,” said Flanagan. It’s not a full answer, it’s not the basis for anything, but it is all we have. “In the end, the only answer we have to politics, to power, to horror, is the love we might know for each other. “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

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. “But story is something more fundamental and oddly abstract,” he said.

“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. 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.

The long road to the deep north review