The Big Read: Bonfire of the vanities

27 October 2014 - 02:08 By Darrel Bristow-Bovey
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FIRE WARNING: There's a danger in not trying to start your fire with whatever is at hand
FIRE WARNING: There's a danger in not trying to start your fire with whatever is at hand
Image: THINKSTOCK

So that damned Aussie Richard Flanagan had to go and win the Booker Prize.

Just when you think you're getting the better of those swines on the rugby field and the cricket pitch, and just when they have a prime minister almost as embarrassing as our president, they have to go and gobble up some culture when you're not looking.

The day after the prize was announced, all the reports about Flanagan repeated the same story about how he'd been working on The Narrow Road to the Deep North for 12 years and had written five drafts and how each time he used the previous draft to light barbecue fires before starting the new one. This anecdote taught me a number of things. One is how desperate the world is for writers who still seem slightly interesting and outdoorsy, rather than pale-faced mopers hunched over their keyboards, punting themselves on Twitter and morosely googling their own names. There are no Hemingways any more, but the image of someone burning their work, even in so resolutely surburban a setting as a Sydney backyard, is more arresting than someone pressing "delete" without making sure the document is backed up to the Cloud.

Flanagan did his best to make the whole thing sound rugged, like the sly larrikin that he is. "I had the idea for the story while walking over Sydney Harbour Bridge," he declared, as though it was the Khyber Pass, "and I wrote it all down on beer coasters in a bar called The Rocks." Which sounds impressively rough-hewn and unshaven until you discover that the first draft was apparently "a novel of linked haikus".

But clearly this is one of the advantages that the Aussie novelists have over South Africans: apparently in Australia you can still find beer coasters that aren't covered in brand logos. Presumably they have a range of blank or feint-lined beer mats with space enough for the itinerant author to jot down plotlines and story ideas. Also, bar-staff in Australia will leave you sitting there accumulating a growing pile of their defaced coasters, instead of just giving you a piece of paper. The other advantage your Aussie scribblers have over their African rivals is they don't know the proper way to make fires.

What self-respecting South African would light a braai using bits of paper? Even if you wanted to, you wouldn't be allowed: there's always some helpful friend on hand to tell you that you're doing it wrong. Try making your fire with anything but wood and Blitz and Charka and you'll be sent to the kitchen to make salads with the New Zealanders. No, we are the self-regulating Fahrenheit 451 experts of the southern hemisphere, and that's our failing. We don't allow ourselves to endlessly start over and redo with new materials. We're expected to stick with what we have, with the basic building blocks of combustion, the endless self-repeating rough draft of our history.

I'm especially pensive about Flanagan winning the prize, although by every account it's well deserved, because his novel is set against the backdrop of the POW work camps in Thailand, where Allied prisoners worked as slave labour to build the Death Railway through the mountains and jungles linking Bangkok and Burma. I was in Kanchanaburi a few months ago, and I walked through the war cemetery with its long unshaded rows of the long-dead boys of 1943. I came upon one tombstone with a name and an age and a place of origin: South Africa. For days afterwards I thought about that far-buried South African and what he might have felt and what might have happened and who might have been waiting at home.

Later I discussed it with a friend, musing about the possibility of a novel or a screenplay, and my friend wanted to know why that story, and wasn't it a form of historical escapism, and did I not perhaps consider that I was shirking the moral responsibility of grappling with what it means to be a white South African? Does South Africa or the world need another white man's story about white men and white men's history? What about other voices and other experiences?

I argued, of course, but ideas and stories when given air too soon are easily winged and wounded and brought down. No great damage was done by that; certainly the world wasn't denied any great novel and anyway Flanagan already had a headstart of 12 years and five drafts and - assuming 10 double-sided pages per barbecue and 464 pages per draft - roughly 232 barbecue fires. But there's a danger in not trying to start your fire with whatever you have at hand, with whatever will catch flame. There's a danger you'll end up never making a fire at all.

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