The Sound of One Hand Clapping

by Richard Flanagan

  crn mozic

  hodi po noci

  nima nozic’

  And Sonja, baby cradled in her arms, would sing softly back, full of love, a song she had known for so long she could not remember learning it, a Slovenian lullaby.

  ‘Lunica ziblje:

  aja, aj, aj,

  spancek se smeje

  aja, aj, aj.

  ‘Tiho se duri

  okna odpro

  vleze se v zibko

  zatisne oko

  ‘Lunica ziblje:

  aja, aj, aj,

  spancek se smeje

  aja, aj, aj.’

  She would spend some time making sure her bearings were exactly right, then, when finally satisfied, push four sticks into the wet, soft warm earth. Out of the carton she would take a large reel of red ribbon and with it she would mark out the boundaries of what had been their home all that long time ago. Each stick a corner and around each stick the red ribbon wrapped and strung to the next corner. Out of the carton she would take a blanket that she would spread in the middle of that nowhere defined by the ruffling ribbon and place her child upon it.

  Sometimes Sonja would close her eyes and imagine what a strange sight it must make from a distance: the green blur of the forest and in front the thin blood trickle of the red ribbon where once had been Maria and her hoping for what they would never know and now were her and her daughter searching for what they never had, holes within holes within holes, and she would feel dizzy seeing it all so clearly. Sometimes she would daydream that she opened her eyes and the whole plain was filled with red-ribboned rectangles, as far as the eye could see, and in each rectangle sat a parent with a child, saying, ‘This was my home,’ as she would always say to her uncomprehending child. ‘Once.’

  Red-ribboned rectangles receding into infinity.

  Then Sonja would take out some lunch things and they would eat, she feeding the baby first then herself. Finally out of the carton she would carefully lift an old and battered music box, which she would wind up, and set upon the ground.

  Then she would lie down on her side upon the blanket, hold the baby to her belly and slowly raise the lid of the music box that sat only inches away from her nose. The clockwork mechanism version of ‘Lara’s Theme’ would start up. The ballet dancer would begin her endless twirling, circles within circles within the music box’s valley of mirrors, and within each mirror were the trees of the forest in which Sonja’s mother had hanged herself, those vast, huge bluegums that swayed back and forth in the wind.

  They would watch, as they watched mesmerised every visit, how the music box’s frame of black lacquered wood wrapped around the mirrored forest, and how in front of that vast wilderness the toy ballerina would twist and turn until ‘Lara’s Theme’ slowed down and then stopped altogether. Then Sonja would shut the box and the mirrored forest disappear. The baby would cry out in disappointment.

  Sonja would turn on to her stomach on the wet ground. Faraway she could see the forest, wet from the last shower of rain, glistening like an animal in the shafts of sunlight that punctured the ink-blue clouds above. The child’s crying would ebb, then stop altogether. The child, sitting on the blanket, would look unknowingly, wide-eyed at her, and all that would remain would be the sounds of the wind in the huge eucalypts.

  Sonja would hold her face close to the damp ground, close to the acrid, fecund peat that overlaid the hard clay, the sour gravel, and feel the long dewy grass with her chin, run her lips along the earth. Her body burning like fire. Her hands running over the ground. Her face being feathered by the wet grass. Bowing buttongrass threading water droplets. Pearls of dew spreading across her cheeks. Necklaces of grace. And as she lay so on the ground she would hold her child close and whisper her daughter’s name. Her beautiful name.

  ‘Maria,’ she would say to the earth, ‘my Maria.’

  And Sonja would put her finger in her baby’s pudgy fist and draw the fist to her trembling lips, for how would she ever tell her daughter of what only those who lived it can ever know?

  For it was all long, long ago in a world that has since perished into peat, in a forgotten winter on an island of which few have ever heard. In that time before snow, completely and irrevocably, covers footprints. As black clouds shroud the star and moonlit heavens, as an unshadowable darkness comes upon the whispering land.

  At that precise moment, around which time was to cusp.

  ALSO BY RICHARD FLANAGAN AND AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE

  Death of a River Guide

  Beneath a waterfall on the Franklin, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, lies drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. In the rainforest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking. As the river rises, his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of his past Aljaz discovers the soul history of his country.

  Richard Flanagan’s stunning 1994 debut about a mythical Tasmania dazzled readers around the world, and is now recognised as one of the most powerful and original Australian novels of recent decades.

  Praise for Death of a River Guide

  ‘Marks one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing.’—The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Death of a River Guide is the birth of a daring talent. The mythos here is wholly Australia, but Flanagan uses rafting as effectively as Hemingway used bullfighting to explore the existential struggle to act nobly in the face of death.’—The Christian Science Monitor

  ‘Makes good on a truly soaring ambition and flirts with literary greatness.’—Chicago Tribune

  ‘Beautiful and lyrical.’—The Washington Post

  ‘Haunting and ambitious … realistic and biting.’—The New York Times Book Review

  ‘Superb … a richly layered narrative … a work of considerable originality. Flanagan’s two novels rank with the finest fiction out of Australia since the heyday of Patrick White.’—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  ‘This first novel combines the narrative ingenuity of Golding’s Pincher Martin with the imaginative detail of de Bernières’ Captain Corelli. It’s a torrent of a book – take the plunge.’—The Independent

  ‘A novel of consummate artistry and towering humanity … An enormous, intricate, intimate tapestry not only of the wilderness, but also of a family, an expansive tribal community.’—The Baltimore Sun

  ‘[Death of a River Guide] defies superlatives. It is that rare commodity – a wonderful fiction which has pace, depth of feeling, and infinite imaginative possibilities.’—Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Richard Flanagan’s first novel could well become a classic, doing for Tasmania what Gabriel García Márquez did for Colombia or William Faulkner did for Mississippi.’—Mercury

  ‘Combines a rich voice, highly original, with great invention and engrossing narrative pace. A fine work of fiction. I thought it very, very good indeed.’—Thomas Keneally

  ‘The sort of stunt Faulkner and Ambrose Bierce together might have concocted … a triumphant tour de force.’—The News & Observer

  ‘The flow of language brilliantly stimulates Tasmania’s mighty Franklin River … A powerful and exciting odyssey that can fairly claim to be an epic.’—The Weekend Australian

  ‘Like the river which runs through it, Death of a River Guide is possessed of both a fierce, seething energy and a limpid, unexpected tranquillity.’—The Irish Times

  ‘If Flanagan never writes another book, he should be remembered for this one.’—The Austin Chronicle

  ‘A stunning debut novel.’—The Sunday Mail

  ‘There is a great sense of humanity about this book, a concern for the spirit as well as for the trials of physical existence … Uplifting and immensely rewarding.’—Australian Book Review

  Gould’s Book of Fish

  Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things
on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer & forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

  Once upon a time, there were miracles…

  Praise for Gould’s Book of Fish

  ‘A masterpiece.’—The Times

  ‘A brilliantly rendered work of the imagination that investigates the complex relationships among art, ordinary human life and the natural world with great intelligence and unquestionable panache … The book is full of wild hilarity, heartbreaking cruelty and suffering, and finally love, both selfless and profane … A work of significant genius.’—Chicago Tribune

  ‘A seamless masterpiece.’—The Independent on Sunday

  ‘I have read nothing finer than Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. Lyrical and hilarious, tender and wildly angry by turns, it reimagines the grim early history of Tasmania and at the same time dazzlingly reconceives the form of the novel.’—Peter Conrad, The Observer

  ‘[Flanagan’s] writing has the unmistakeable shimmer of literary star quality.’—New Statesman

  ‘Most good novels arrive out of some quarrel with reality – an impossible romance, tragic loss, a social broadside of satirical anger. A few great ones raise an all-out war cry and trawl with abandon across all the familiar categories of fictional invention. Gould’s Book of Fish … is just such a great book, by turns bawdy and pensive, moving and abrasive, visionary and squalid, apocalyptic and confessional.’—The Washington Post

  ‘One part Rabelais, one part García Márquez, one part Ned Kelly.’—The New York Times Book Review

  ‘[Flanagan is] … one of the novel’s most ambitious talents, one whose every book … commands our attention.’—Los Angeles Times Book Review

  ‘Gould’s Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way that Moby Dick is a novel about a whale or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day …a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art and history and nature.’—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  ‘An astonishing masterpiece that challenges, provokes, and entertains at every turn.’—Star Tribune

  ‘This remarkable novel is a meditation on colonialism – indeed, on history itself – couched in the story of an English guttersnipe … Flanagan also supplies one of the most profound sex scenes in recent literature … A serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, “swimming in vast coldness, alone”.’—The New Yorker

  ‘A work of pure brilliance.’—The Seattle Times

  ‘It ushers in a range of ideas that much contemporary writing grasps at but ends up simply nodding to … hugely original … There is so much to savour in this rolling, picaresque tale of grotesques and their progress: so much unfettered imagination, so much sly irony and comic anarchy. Passages burn with the intense pleasure of story-making, of the abandon that comes from a seething of ideas and their joyful mutation into words.’—The Guardian

  ‘Is it a masterpiece? Halfway through my second read, I know so.’—Good Reading

  ‘I became convinced that this was a truly great book that would be read by serious people long after most of the literary fiction of our time is forgotten.’—Richard Holloway, The Herald (Glasgow)

  The Unknown Terrorist

  What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country?

  Gina Davies is about to find out.

  After spending a night with an attractive stranger, she has become a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack. When police find three unexploded bombs at a stadium and her mysterious lover suddenly goes missing, Gina goes on the run and witnesses every truth of her life twisted into a betrayal.

  The Unknown Terrorist is a relentless tour de force that paints a devastating picture of a contemporary society gone haywire, where the ceaseless drumbeat of terror-alert levels, newsbreaks and fear of the unknown pushes one woman ever closer to breaking point.

  Praise for The Unknown Terrorist

  ‘Stunning … an armature for a brilliant meditation on the post-9/11 world … it does a dazzling job of limning its subject, conjuring up the postmodern, post-sci-fi world of globalised terror and trade …[Flanagan’s] written a book that deserves to win him the sort of readership enjoyed by two much better-known novelists with whom he has much in common: Don DeLillo and Martin Amis.’—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  ‘Anyone can do grandeur, but it takes a special literary skill to make squalor grand … [Flanagan] aspires to transmute the dangerous lunacy of today into art … Brilliantly Flanaganian at moments … Here is the vitally vicious Flanagan who can stop a reader’s breath.’—Melvin Jules Bukiet, Los Angeles Times

  ‘Australia’s sun-kissed streets become as sweaty and oppressive as the Algerian beach in Camus’ The Stranger.’—Entertainment Weekly

  ‘A beginning so brilliant it suggests [Flanagan] could be the next John le Carré if he makes his shift to pulp fiction permanent … The writing has the pizzazz you’d expect from the award-laden author of Gould’s Book of Fish, and the political and social satire is incisive.’—The Sunday Times

  ‘Like Showgirls written by Don DeLillo instead of Joe Eszterhas.’—Matt Thorne, Literary Review

  ‘Flanagan’s tightly crafted narrative is akin to the oppressive power of Kafka’s Trial, or Capote’s In Cold Blood, stark realism revealing underlying sickness.’—David Masiel, The Washington Post

  ‘A tightly riveted, almost classic thriller … This is a damn good story delivered with the glittering prose that only the rage of just moral anger can achieve.’—The Times

  ‘Nothing short of brilliance. Read this novel now, before it’s too late for any of us to understand its message.’—Scotland on Sunday

  ‘The fast-paced narrative builds to a fittingly bloody crescendo, and Flanagan drops astutely cynical observations along the way … A true page-turner as well as a timely, pithy critique of celebrity culture and the politics of fear-mongering.’—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  ‘Flanagan’s writing is a brilliant reflection of Gina’s world. Full of steamy sex, drugs and violence, with a touch of high-status voyeurism, packaged into short chapters perfect for readers with limited attention spans, The Unknown Terrorist mocks the thriller genre even as it fulfils its expectations.’—Uzodinma Iweala, The New York Times Review of Books

  ‘A funny, filmic and gripping writer, [Flanagan’s] a novelist and philosopher of our time.’—Daily Mail

  ‘A terrific novel, maintained at fever heat but never straying beyond the bounds of possible or even the likely.’—James Buchan, The Guardian

  ‘Captivating … A masterpiece in craft and structure. Convincing as both thriller and tragedy … Like all great stories it transports the reader to a particular place in time and space.’—Philip Kopper, The Washington Times

  ‘Once in a while a thriller of genuine importance comes along, fired by passionate concern.’—Toby Clements, The Daily Telegraph (UK)

  Wanting

  1841. In the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, a barefoot Aboriginal girl sits for her portrait in a red silk dress. She is Mathinna, the adopted daughter of the island’s governor, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, and the subject of a grand experiment in civilisation – one that will determine whether science and reason can be imposed in place of savagery and desire.

  Years pass. Sir John Franklin has disappeared, along with his crew and two ships, on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. England is horrified as reports of cannibalism filter back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, for whom Franklin’s story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own soul.

  As several lives become entwined by unexpect
ed events and tragedies, Wanting transforms into a novel about the ways in which desire – and its denial – shape us all.

  Praise for Wanting

  ‘One of the best novels of the year.’ —The Times

  ‘In Wanting, Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection in its many forms – that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love.’ —Los Angeles Times

  ‘What a voice! … This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several more … Dickens would have applauded Flanagan’s style … There can be no author more passionate or unfettered than Flanagan.’ —The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Richard Flanagan’s Wanting reminds us that he is one of the most exciting novelists working anywhere, full stop.’—Kevin Rabalais, The Age

  ‘Flanagan sets his novel in the wilds of nineteenth-century Tasmania and evokes its inhabitants with exquisite precision … Flanagan forges …an entirely unified meditation on desire, “the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs.”’ —The New Yorker

  ‘Flanagan is a novelist of such gifts that a recitation of his plot is only a hint of the layered pleasures of his prose, in which action and voices and dreams and hints all swirl in a blunt yet lyrical style utterly his own.’ —The Oregonian