Prisoner of art

Today I heard an interview with a Booker prize winning novelist, Richard Flanagan.

An inspiring interview and a man with something very important to say.

And yet I wonder if the high-art novel form does his message justice.

Why?

Firstly it’s only accessible to the very literate. It’s written in that Booker prize winning fashion with every sentence carefully crafted and a marvel of persistence. Which, in my opinion, gets in the way of the story and the message.

Think of this like eating at a three hat Restaurant. Molecularly assembled food for the cognoscenti but so rich that you need two livers to complete the meal.

And in this, the book is preaching only to the worldly inconvertible.

And secondly, the author intermittently drops into ‘god the narrator’ mode. As in:

“The men were like other young men, unknown to themselves”.

This infuriates me. There is no God that proffers opinions and absolute truths like this are by their very nature deniable.

Some young men know more of themselves than some old men. Some are callow and some come from places that allow them to just ‘be’ from the moment they are born.

I believe that any such generalisations should be derived from the narrative by the reader.

Let the story guide the reader. And let the reader derive their own meaning from the novel.

Authors are simply foster parents and efforts to control their children after they have left the nest simply spoil the result.