Review: Death of a River Guide

Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Flanagan is perhaps my current favorite living writer in the world. His two most recent books – The Narrow Road to the Deep North and First Person – are two of the three or four best books I’ve read in the last three years, and I think he may make sense as a Nobel Prize candidate. (And I need someone to root for in that department now that Philip Roth is gone.)

This is Flanagan’s first novel. It has a great-sounding premise, too: our narrator Aljaz is, as the title says, a river guide. Also, as the title says, he is dying. He’s caught in the narrows of a raging river, and, as he fights drowning, he has a series of visions of his life, his father’s life, and the lives of his ancestors who found their way to the remote part of Tasmania where he grew up.

In many ways, though, I think this is too clever a premise. The writing here is always fine, but there’s a preciousness to some of it that rubs me the wrong way. For one thing, it begins with a narrative of his own birth, one that implies the removed visions he’ll have throughout, but one that suggests to me an entirely different trajectory than the novel eventually takes.

For another, our narrator switches back and forth between first- and third-person, sometimes speaking of ‘I’ and sometimes of ‘Aljaz,’ sometimes even switching between the two mid-anecdote. I think there’s a method to it – I find Flanagan too careful a writer even here to make a casual mistake; I think, that is, it reflects a sense that he really is leaving himself behind, that his ego is slipping from a self-centered perspective to a perspective from all the human family who have known this place. Still, it comes across as awkward.

In similar fashion, we get a great deal implied. I’m not asking for a world writer to condescend to dump a lot of information about the history of his esoteric community, but this does seem unnecessarily complicated. I compare it in ambition to the best work of an earlier of my favorite living writers, Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here. Richler certainly never pauses to feed us tidbits of Canadian history, but he does find ways to give us more clues within the narrative than Flanagan does here.

So, for two-thirds of this, I hung on for the beautiful prose and for the way the occasional anecdote about Aljaz’s life would simply sparkle. (The fragmented story of an ancestor who escaped the penal colony to find his way to a “New Jerusalem” has a lot of resonance, as does Aljaz’s broken love story with a woman of partial Chinese ancestry.) It didn’t come together for me as a whole, and I found myself checking the number of unread pages more often than is usually a good sign.

As I hit the homestretch here, the final 50-60 pages, though, something seemed to click. Part of me thought I might have been witnessing the effective birth of the author I’ve come to admire through his more recent work; part of me thought maybe I’d finally accumulated enough background to pick up on how the whole worked together.

In any case, there are some gorgeous passages that not only evoke the raw beauty of the landscape but that also ground the rest of the narrative. Flanagan makes clearer what’s going on around Aljaz (and how he came to be in his predicament, something that’s not as clear as I describe it until close to the end) and he shows the man growing into a larger awareness of the world he has known throughout his life.

Just by way of example, there’s a magnificent passage at the end of chapter eight that marks part of that late-novel amplification. In it, semi-SPOILER, we learn that Aljaz, like so many of his fellow Tasmanians, has some aboriginal ancestry. That’s his story, but it’s also really the story of the world around him. As he writes, “most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss. And when the long night fell they slept together, some openly, some illicitly, but whether they slept together out of shame or pride or indifferent lust the consequence was the same: they begat children to one another. But the lies were told with sufficient force that for a good many years even the parents remained silent, and whispered their truths only occasionally, and then only in the wilds where no one would hear, or in the depths of drink when no one would remember.”

That, I maintain, is some seriously gifted writing.

First Person had a similar leap in quality toward the end – such an extraordinary leap that it went from being a novel I was mostly enjoying to one I think may be the equal of the Booker-prize winning Narrow Road to the Deep North. This one, less impressive throughout than First Person, goes from being one that I largely endured to one that I now admire. I doubt I’ll have the patience to re-read this one any time soon – for one thing, I intend to try to get through all the rest of Flanagan, which means the second through fifth novels he’s written – but I have a suspicion that giving this a little more attention would make it even more rewarding.

For now, I want to see the kind of artistic leap Flanagan made between this one and the next. Somewhere, I am convinced, I’ll be able to locate when this talented writer moved from being really good to flat-out world-class.


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