Richard Flanagan: “It’s the job of writing to be true”

I don’t mean it in a rude way but that’s the wrong way of framing it. For me, stories are ways of discovering and revealing the truth, a way of parting the mist and seeing what’s actually there. I think fiction succeeds in asking the right questions whereas it fails when it thinks it has the answers. Politics and religions propose answers. And they also lead us into periods of great distress and suffering.

I wrote this book out of the novelistic part of me. I’ve worked in journalism and history, and that demands a different aspect of you. Doing your job [referring to the interviewer] requires you to proceed outwards. You report on what you touch, feel, hear, and see, to the extent you offer a commentary, making it clear it’s an opinion separate from what you touched, felt, heard, and saw. But for this book, I wanted to go into my soul and try to ask the right questions about certain things.

I’ve always been aware that I only exist because of this terrible crime [atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] against humanity. So, for most of my adult life, I’ve read a lot about it and thought even more about it, trying to understand why it happened. We’re always presented with it as a story of one scientific discovery leading to another, but what I show in this book is that that too begins out of stories, from an American research project becoming the Manhattan Project, becoming the bomb that falls on Hiroshima, and therefore I’m here talking to you. All that begins with a fiction.

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

Question 7’s structure is much like that chain reaction Szilard thought of. The book begins with your father’s life moving swiftly to the passionate romance between HG Wells and Rebecca West, and so on, breaking away from the binary way of telling a personal story.

I think we live in a true fiction where we think we create ourselves. We don’t see that we’re imprisoned and sometimes liberated by the stories that are much older than us, and that these stories can sometimes be terrible, and they can sometimes be transcendent. But once we see them and understand them, they allow us to act differently and become who we really should be and wish to be.

The other thing is that today is an age which celebrates this idea of numbers and metrics, and we’re told that’s the only way to define the world. But if we think about our stories more, perhaps there is wisdom in there that is more relevant and insightful than what a binary code can tell us about ourselves. I think one of the dilemmas we face today is that we allow a binary code to determine so much of what we are. We’re entrapped and lost within the algorithm, which is determined and shaped purely by the needs of profit. And to escape it, we should look back at the larger stories that we live within, and we should try to create better stories.

“Somewhere there was a real world where all that passed continued to exist.” You note this about the atomic bombings, and it seems what’s happening in Gaza is a testament to this. It also reminds me of the protests writers staged against the Adelaide Writers’ Week on the exclusion of Randa Abdel-Fattah.

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

I think one can agree or disagree with a Palestinian writer’s viewpoint, but she must be allowed to be heard. 70,000 of her people have died. Someone must be allowed to speak for them.

By and large, writers, who’re being told that they’re so worthless that they’ll be replaced by machines, and for whom coming to a festival like this one [Jaipur] or the one in Adelaide is a high point, nevertheless had the insight to recognise that the next time, it might not be a Palestinian, it might be someone who stood up on a social or an environment issue. Writers are a very disparate group of people, with many beliefs and ideas. But what writers did in this case moved me greatly, and I felt a certain pride calling myself a writer after that.

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

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

If you seek to write something true and you feel an obligation to not write something or a duty not to write something, then your writing will fail. Of course, you should try to respect people and not hurt them. That matters. But ultimately, it’s not the job of writing to be ethical or responsible. It’s the job of writing to be true, and also not to be boring. The only two things that matter. That’s it. But if you forget that, you’re finished.

We go to art to discover what we share with other people. We could be murderers. We could be a saint. Or a holy man. We’ve all these possibilities, from being the most beautiful to being the most terrible. Circumstances have created you [pointing to interviewer] as a journalist, and me as a writer. But in another world, we may as well have been monsters. So, the job of art is to travel into your soul and [help you] discover not who you are, but what you share with others. Ultimately, what you find there when you succeed is that you’re not one person but an infinity, and you write from that infinity.

I don’t think that’s a mystical idea, because I think everyone knows this, but only in rare moments of great grief or physical ecstasy. But then they have to put it back in a box and live their life as me or you and pretend and go back to displaying this one identity, which of course we’re not.

Your debut novel, Death of a River Guide, was based on your near-drowning experience. In Question 7, you articulately recollect it, noting that often a writer repurposes the same story. By playing with fact and fiction, were you trying to locate an in-betweenness in what had happened or could have happened?

It’s a large idea. I have to think about it.

I think what that experience gave me was my life. One life ended there. The life I’ve had ever since, I feel, is a dream. And in that dream, I’ve realised only certain things matter. Kindness, goodness, love, and honouring those in whatever way you can are perhaps the most important and necessary things you can do.

While the Booker win may have offered you more readership, with the Baillie Gifford win, you chose to decline the money. Many writers may not have taken this step.

The Booker was a catastrophe 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 up as a moral example because then it becomes a form of moral blackmail.

In my instance, the book I won it with talks specifically about the immense sadness I feel about what climate change is doing to the island I come from. I find it infinitely sad and wrong. I felt I was just in an impossible situation. I couldn’t write this book and mean that and take this money if it came from that source. But it was a complex situation, because the people who donated the money weren’t the worst people. They were well-intentioned. I thought it mattered, too, in the way I said no, allowing them their dignity and showing respect, because, in a sense, we’re all trapped in this horror. I’m only here [in Jaipur] because I flew in a plane, dumping tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. We’re all in cars. We’re all putting carbon into the atmosphere and destroying the world we need to continue to exist, for us to exist. None of us is innocent in this. I felt I had no choice, but I am not morally pure on this at all.

What kind of writers did you read growing up?

I always feel remorseful when I answer this question, because there have been many writers who mattered to me. And whenever I start making a list, I realise I’ve forgotten some of them. When I was young, it was [Franz] Kafka, [William] Faulkner, the Latin Americans, the Russians, the French. [Albert] Camus was very important to me.

But you have your needs as a writer. You need to discover your world. Some writers explain your world to you better than others. But I wasn’t particularly interested in English writers because they seemed like the voice of the occupying power. It doesn’t mean British writers aren’t wonderful writers, they just weren’t the writers I needed or who mattered to me. I tend to find that the writing of other colonised countries that suffered the horror of empire. They were the ones I found revelatory.

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