Richard Flanagan / Features / Untitled Books

"Novels are one of the last things we have where a person can speak their truths untrammelled by the dictates of money, and that makes them ever more remarkable and unique."

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan's new book Wanting links Dickensian London with a Van Diemen's Land penal colony. Its genesis was a portrait of a young aboriginal girl, whose hidden bare feet suggested to him a tale of desire and its lack. He talks to Viola Fort about its subject Mathinna, his time at Oxford, and the corrupting influence of creative writing courses.

"So, tell me, how do you think the web is affecting publishing?" Richard Flanagan is full of questions. As soon as he takes his seat in the empty drawing room of his hotel, which slowly fills with autumn sunlight while half-grapefruits and Eggs Benedict are devoured in the breakfast room next door, he picks up the conversation and runs with it, and for every viewpoint he offers, he seeks one in return. He is a keen conversationalist; urbane, erudite, full of considered opinions, verbatim quotations and recommendations. His desire to chat, rather than play the usual volley of Q&A, translates as a combination of curiosity, charm and deflection from the personal; "I'm not interested in myself," he says, shifting in his seat as soon as I try to steer the conversation back to him, "I like other people." He is reluctant to talk in detail about his latest novel, Wanting, and while his publicist may not be thrilled, who can blame him? At the tail end of an international book tour, he is tired of the subject. "I get so embarrassed these days because every time you're just conscious of repeating things," he demurs wearily, running a large hand over his closely shaved head. In any case, she needn't worry; the book speaks for itself, and Flanagan is excellent company.

Flanagan first came to public notice in this country with his third novel, Gould's Book of Fish, which reanimates the real-life figure of William Buelow Gould, a convict incarcerated on Sarah Island, a penal colony off the coast of Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania. At the whim of the colonial regime, Gould was commissioned to make 26 painted studies of indigenous fish while serving out his sentence. These illustrations form the skeleton of Flanagan's book, and the book's design is integral to the narrative. Twelve of the fish are included, every chapter is printed in a different coloured ink, and Flanagan found a designer for the book before he even started writing. "I wrote this book with the ambition of being unfilmable," he jokes.

He returns to Van Diemen's Land in latest novel Wanting. As with Gould, the genesis for the story was an historical figure, an aboriginal girl named Mathinna. Flanagan first came across her in a Hobart Museum where he was shown an unusual watercolour portrait of the girl wearing a red dress. The curator then pulled up the frame to reveal that the picture had been cropped, explaining that Mathinna's bare feet embarrassed her adoptive parents, who were the island's governor and his socially ambitious wife. Mathinna's refusal to wear shoes betrayed her savage provenance, so they cut her off at the ankles.

Flanagan found the story intensely moving, and was instantly lost to it, "although it would take me another half lifetime and a lot of struggle to write it," he laughs. "I thought there was this large story of love and it's denial in those feet that had been framed out of the picture. I knew what the book was at that moment, I knew exactly what the emotion was." The novel is a meditation on desire and its lack, (the Wanting of the title a negative reflex of the word's two meanings) and finds its expression in the uncovering of two secret histories; in the new world, Mathinna's, and in the old, somewhat surprisingly, that of Charles Dickens, whose gradually curdling marriage and growing friendship with a young actress led him to question his values as a writer and a man.

Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961 to Catholic parents, the fifth of six children. He attended university there before going on to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. "In those days it was very hard to get out of Australia, it was very expensive," he remembers, "so this was an extraordinary thing," He was there for three years, but felt at odds with the spirit of the place and the attitudes of his fellow students. "I came from a place that was seen to be very marginal, and I felt I'd got very lucky, that I'd slipped through the net. I thought I shouldn't really have been there and that I'd get found out."

The entitled indifference of his peers ("I came to realise that the people I was meeting weren't educated, they'd simply been given this profound grounding and a patrician superiority") and the casual xenophobia of his teachers soured somewhat his time at Oxford. One don routinely referred to him as 'convict' , while another famous left wing don declared with alacrity that 'Australia has no culture', a charge to which Flanagan now responds, "I have a great respect for European culture, I think it's extraordinary. But it is also a history of organised barbarism, that's the other side of it. 40,000 years before human beings trod on this continent there was a civilisation in my country that took its meanings not from monuments or wars but from an idea of story." He laughs, bemused. "It was so absurdly ignorant to say the place had no culture." The lasting impact seems to be a strong identification with non-European writing, that of the Latin Americans in particular, and ruby slippers-moment (though in his case he was returning to Oz) "I came to realise that life wasn't really here at all, and that the world I came from was far more extraordinary than I had realised."

He lives now in Hobart, on the southern tip of Tasmania, with his Slovenian wife Madja Smolej and their three children. The island seems to have exerted a powerful influence on his writing, its landscape and traumatic colonial history shaping the lives of his characters. He is swift to reject such interpretations, however, pointing out, "if you were talking to Paul Auster about Manhattan, you wouldn't be so concerned about it; it would seem natural and obvious that someone living in Brooklyn would write about Brooklyn. You would not harry Philip Roth about why New Jersey matters so much." If he sounds spiky, he isn't, but his frustration with the pigeon-holing of writers is evident. "Whenever I'm asked these sorts of questions my first response is: why is it that a writer from a place that doesn't exist in the world of European culture should seem so odd? It seems to be what writers do."

I ask if he'd ever like to teach, and he looks faintly horrified. "I'd be very worried I'd cripple them."

He was once offered $60,000 for three months' teaching creative writing in America, "A no-brainer!" said his prospective employer. "I thought it was ludicrous," Flanagan laughs. It raises a serious point though, and Flanagan disapproves of the prevailing influence creative writing schools are having on literature. Such courses paradoxically serve as a distraction from writing. "in America I think its been hugely corrosive because, in the end, many writers who perhaps would have been great became career academics. They set themselves up as the African-America Writer, or the Jewish-American Writer or the Regional American Writer, but what got lost was the writing."

He feels very strongly that the responsibility for good writing must fall to the writer, and not be conceded to organised courses; it anesthetises the writing and corrupts the process; "I think it's become a form of patronage. And really, the novel is at its most successful when it escapes patronage, and it strives to have a relationship with the reader, not the patrons." He is sceptical of the inflated profile of creative writing schools and likens them to the public loos in Hyde Park, "if you set these things up enough people will pass through them. The great names will also go to the urinal. I'm not sure that is an imprimatur of greatness."

It also frustrates him that such courses are increasingly seen to be the de facto path to a career in writing. "It's very hard for people starting up writing because they wish to assert that they are a writer and being enrolled on a course allows you to have that dignity, I guess; I don't know if that's sufficient justification." And a lot of people want to be writers but are less interested in writing, you know, they're interested in the noun rather than the verb. But Godspeed to them. I'm honestly not..." He stops suddenly, aware we've spent far too long on the subject, then looks up suddenly, "I just look at them with bemusement," he says," some great writers have come out of them, but I wouldn't have the temerity to tell another human being how you might write a book."

He leans back in his chair. "Vexing as it often is and difficult as it often is, I do love being allowed to sit at a table and write a book. I've been lucky. I like the work, I like the work very much," he smiles. "I never thought I'd be in such a privileged position."

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Wanting is published by Atlantic Books

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Monday, 12 October, 2009