Though rarely heretical, Richard Flanagan’s essays have a ferocious moral force

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, University of Western Australia

Richard Flanagan’s latest book Heresies is a collection of 24 occasional pieces published between 2009 and 2025. They cover a range of topics dear to the author’s heart but also display the deep thinking and reading of one of Australia’s leading writers.

Review: Heresies – Richard Flanagan (Penguin)

Many were first published in The Guardian and The Monthly. Some had their first airings in public forums, particularly literary festivals, but also to more general audiences such as the National Press Club and the Garma Festival. On these occasions one can hear Flanagan leaning, a little like Tim Winton, into his demotic rhythms and vernacular flourishes to carry his case.

While there is a tendency to speak slightingly of collections of occasional pieces, Flanagan’s eminence justifies their republication. As well as providing a record of his public stances, they are also illuminating in their own right. Flanagan is a natural raconteur and even when he is seething with anger and indignation, which he often is, he rarely fails to hit his phrases.

Flanagan is best known for his novels, including The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) and The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). This last novel, inspired by his father’s experience on the Burma Railway, won Flanagan the Man Booker Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2014 (the latter alongside Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People). Flanagan donated the proceeds from the Prime Minister’s award to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North has recently enjoyed a successful adaptation as a miniseries on Amazon Prime.

Flanagan is also an accomplished writer of non-fiction, where he brings a combative stance and droll sense of humour to his subjects. His book Toxic (2021) is a devastating exposé of the Tasmanian salmon farming industry.

The next book Question 7 (2023) is a quicksilver memoir that also draws inspiration from his father’s war experience and the remarkable fact that when the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima, his father was toiling as a prisoner of the Japanese in a coal mine a mere 80 miles to the south. Question 7, which won the 2014 Baillie Gifford Prize, weaves the story of the bomb with the story of Flanagan’s father before culminating in a graphic account of the author’s near-death while kayaking on the Franklin River at the age of 21.

I am not certain what Flanagan thinks of book reviewers, but his characterisation of the young Rebecca West in Question 7 gave me pause.

In that book, West is introduced because of her affair with H.G. Wells, whose book The World Set Free (1914) predicted the advent of atomic bombs. The ambitious West, he writes,

began her new career as a book reviewer, a perfect place to leapfrog to an elevated position on the shoulders of the famous she sat on and shat on.

It was the ideal task, he ruminates, for someone “having no original ideas of her own but only a certain ferocity of observation about those who did”.

Flanagan’s own essays also bristle with this ferocity of observation.

Bigger things than writing

There are times when Flanagan seems almost embarrassed by the fact he is a writer and not something less dubious. While addressing the 2014 Perth Writers Festival, he explains he had altered his prepared speech because of the news of the tragic death of an asylum seeker, Reza Barati, in the Manus Island detention centre.

Two years later, when giving the 2016 Boisbouvier Lecture, Flanagan again interrupted his intended topic with revelations made about the Manus Island facility. The centrepiece of the lecture became the reading-out of graphic internal emails sent between staff at Manus obtained and published by The Guardian.

Flanagan wants his audience to know that while literature is all well and good, there are bigger things we need to worry about. There is not really an answer to this complaint since it is one that Flanagan seems, in the end, to be making against himself. He repeatedly objects to his own case and suspends his own transmission. But one might safely assume the kinds of audiences Flanagan addresses at literary festivals would be largely supportive of the causes he wishes to spotlight at such moments.

This is not to doubt the sincerity of Flanagan’s views or to underplay the seriousness of the matters raised, but it did cause me to wonder about the concept of heresy that is used to frame the collection.

In traditional religious terms, to commit heresy is to refute a fundamental tenet of one’s faith. It is not heretical to oppose a precept in the faith to which one does not, and has never, adhered. While many of Flanagan’s contributions are polemical and offer a critique of government policy, they mostly fall within the parameters of established debate.

An article that criticises the Morrison government’s handling of the Black Summer bushfire crisis of 2018–19 is not especially heretical if it is published in The Guardian. It is quite clearly part of that establishment’s accepted doxa. In this sense, Flanagan seems less a heresiarch than a more-or-less standard culture warrior, albeit an eloquent one who can rightly draw on the moral force he has fairly accrued by his achievements in the literary world.

Perhaps the most heretical essay in the collection is the one given the title “The New Victorians”, originally published in The Guardian in 2018.

The article takes issue with cancel culture in the literary world, citing the treatment of novelist Lionel Shriver following her address at the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2016, the dropping of authors Bob Carr and Germaine Greer from the same festival two years later, and the public denunciations of US writer Junot Diaz following allegations made against him of sexual harassment.

Flanagan does not defend the characters of these authors, nor their remarks, but does defend their right to speak. The heretical element comes from the fact that Flanagan has habitually lined up in support of the oppressed. But what if fighting oppression caused oppression? As Flanagan reminds us, in a preface to this piece, these earlier cancellations did offer a precedent for the recent ham-fisted attempts to muzzle writers at the Bendigo and Adelaide Writers Festivals.

Best moments

Arguably, the best moments in Heresies are the least overtly political essays. There is a wonderful reflection on Claudio Magris’s book Danube, first published in 1986. I had not read the book but after reading Flanagan’s reflection I immediately sought it out. In this respect, Flanagan’s passion, trying at times, can also be highly infectious.

But, for me, the real highlight of the collection is Flanagan’s captivating portrait of David Walsh, the gambling genius who funded the utterly inexplicable miracle known as MONA in Tasmania.

Originally published in The New Yorker in 2013 with the predictable title “Tasmanian Devil”, Flanagan wrote the account with the cooperation of Walsh and his eclectic circle of friends and lovers.

In this story, Flanagan finds himself genuinely defeated by the implausibility of the man and the exorbitant folly that Walsh has tunnelled into the cliffs of the upper Derwent to house his obsessions. Flanagan, so often up the front leaning on his horn, seems almost relieved to be in the backseat listening to a tale he could not, after all, have made up.

Flanagan likes to style himself as an untutored savage who learned almost everything he knows by stumbling through the dusty shelves of Mr Browser’s Secondhand Bookshop in Hobart in the 1970s. That he has a master’s degree from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar is mostly airbrushed from the account.

Nevertheless, there is a refreshing immediacy to Flanagan as a reader of books. This love of books and letters is something that comes through all the pieces, even those that derogate the literary world as an unforgivable indulgence.

When Flanagan speaks of books – Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina, Danube – and writers – Franz Kafka, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison – he speaks as if they are his friends.

One moment he throws his arm around them and holds them close. The next he chides them for their failings. He gossips about them and gently satirises their pretensions. He shamelessly soaks up the odd facts of their lives and weaves them into his stories. In a word, he enjoys reading and talking about the books he likes. There are worse crimes.

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