Review: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I guess it’s a good sign when Flanagan takes a title from something like a Zen koan. His 2013 “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is one of the great novels of the 21st Century and this, his second from 1997, is awfully good as well.

After “Narrow Road” and his most recent, the almost as extraordinary First Person, I resolved to read all the Flanagan I could get a hold of. The intervening two were less impressive. His first, Death of a River Guide, had some gorgeous moments, but it seemed to me to take too long to get going an to depend too much on the gimmick of a dying man’s life flashing before his eyes. His fourth, The Unknown Terrorist, seemed to me a post 9/11 novel (inflected by Flanagan’s Tasmanian sense of being on the very edge of the civilized world) without the bite or enduring quality of, say, DeLillo.

So that left two extraordinary novels and two I had reason to admire but not fully appreciate.

This one tips the scales back toward my deep Flanagan admiration – deep enough to have him on my private, no-one-else-cares list of potential Nobel laureates. It’s less ambitious than Narrow Road, and it has nowhere near the psychological games of First Person, but it may be more achingly beautiful than either.

This opens with the unthinkable – Maria Buloh walks into the Tasmanian winter determined never to come home again, and she leaves her three-year-old daughter Sonja alone with her husband, Bojan. The two, daughter and father, are deeply broken people, neither knowing how to love the other. They have fleeting moments of joy, but the bulk of their life together is sordid and disappointed. Bojan drinks, he hits her, and he cannot allow himself to heal from his wife’s abandonment.

Much of the power here comes from what I think may be a Flanagan trademark: the ability to reveal increasingly complicated depths to the characters and situations he’s established. While we might feel inclined to blame Maria for the family’s troubles, we come eventually to see how her despair is shaped by her brutal childhood in World War II. (SPOILER: late in the novel we learn that she was forced to witness the murder of her father, who was assisting partisans fighting the Nazis, and was then raped alongside her mother and sister…all while just 14 years old.)

Bojan seems indifferent to Sonja’s welfare and happiness. He makes her wait in cars outside bars when he drinks, and he forces her to keep house – and pretend to ignore his beating of her – while she’s still a child. Yet Bojan too is haunted by the war-time of his own childhood. He has no patience for religion, for instance, determining that any God that could allow the SS the free rein it had in Yugoslavia could not be a beneficent deity.

Flanagan establishes that despair as the baseline rhythm of the novel, but then he somehow presents glimpses of potential happiness above it. In one heartbreaking stretch, Bojan opens himself up to a new love, with a woman named Jean who has an apple orchard, but he doesn’t know how to ask Sonja if she’d approve of his remarrying, and she doesn’t know how to say it’s something she’d desperately want. Each denies the other something that might have saved each, but the scent of apples lingers, and Sonja never forgets the harvest song.

Eventually, the most important of those potential change-everything possibilities is Sonja’s pregnancy. Flanagan gives us the novel in strands, in a series of chapters from Sonja’s childhood in the 1950s and a separate series from 1989 and 1990. In the latter, Sonja has returned to the Tasmania of her childhood. She’s determined at first to see her father and then have an abortion, but she can’t bring herself to go through with it. She has no hope for the future, no imagined joy, but some kernel of the need to survive keeps pushing her.

(SPOILER:) There’s no climactic moment of change, no instant of redemption, but Flanagan lets us feel the callouses soften. No power on earth can undo the trauma of war-time Europe, and nothing can erase the pain of Sonja’s childhood, but the prospect of a new life, a generation that might live without such shadows, inspires everyone to be a better self. If you don’t read this, it will sound clichéd to (DOUBLE-SPOILER) say that Bojan eventually uses his carpentry skills to make a cradle and other infant furniture for the new baby, a child Sonja names Maria after her mother – whom we learn only at the end has not run away but killed herself.)

If you do read this, though, that emotional payoff, tricky as it may sound, is authentic and moving.

This is a novel with a small scope – really just a family of two – over a half century. In its way it’s magnificent, and it’s evidence of the skill and gift of the young Flanagan, a writer who’s gone on to write some of the best work going.


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