Death of a River Guide | Richard Flanagan

_{As I was born the umbilical cord tangled around my neck and I came into the world both arms flailing, unable to scream and thereby take in the air necessary to begin life outside of the womb, being garrotted by the very thing that had until that time succoured me and given me life.}

This Dickensian, David Copperfield-esque beginning suggests right from the start, that Aljaz Cosini’s story will be epic in nature, a Bildungsroman, that carries us from childhood to maturity and possibly death. And like David Copperfield, Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide, includes many autobiographical elements.

There were two reasons why I wanted to read Death of a River Guide now (and by now, I mean back in February when I actually read it).

• Firstly, Question 7.

I read Flanagan’s memoir in January, one of the strands deals with a horrifying rafting accident that happened to him as a young man. As it turns out, it is an experience he has been writing about and trying to come to terms with ever since. Death of a River Guide was his first book and his first attempt at writing about what happened to him. For myself, I wanted to explore the area between fact and fiction, real life and make believe that obviously exists between these two books.

• Secondly, Tasmania.

Mr Books and I enjoyed a 2 week driving holiday around Tasmania in February. I knew we would be spending some time in the region where Flanagan grew up, so Death of a River Guide was duly packed as one my holiday reads.

The hard part now is to fully explain the impact reading Death of River Guide had on me at this time, after Question 7, whilst in situ.

Firstly place. Flanagan includes the magnificent scenery of Tasmania throughout his book as if it were another character to get to know. I underlined numerous sections and was able to create several instagram posts of the actual location along with appropriate quotes. From Hobart to Strahan, up into the pencil pine forests and of course, down into the gorges and rapids of the Franklin and Gordon rivers. The Tasmanian forests are wild, harsh and dangerous, even to those who know the area well. Flanagan captures this unique terror and beauty with eloquence and hard-won experience. If you are planning a trip to Tasmania, then this is THE book to pack.

_{They felt consumed by the river, felt that they had allowed it to chew them up in its early gorges and were now being digested in its endlessly winding entrails that cut back and forth in crazed meanderings through vast unpeopled mountain ranges. And it frightened them, these people from far away cities whose only measure was man.}

Secondly, the history. Not only is Flanagan’s personal history woven into some of the stories and scenarios given to Cosini, but the history of Tasmania is also a part of the story – the good, the bad and all the bits that many Tasmanians would like to forget or ignore. A sense of loss permeates Cosini’s story – loss of home, loss of family, loss of purpose – and with a wider view, environmental loss, cultural loss, dispossession, loss of life, dignity and hope.

_{. . . my mind fills with a vision of when the English first arrived and the land was fat and full of trees and game. Had the loss begun at this time? When the English first saw plains so thickly speckled with emu and wallaby dung that it looked as if the heavens must have hailed sleek black turds upon this land, when they first saw the sea and the vast blue Derwent River rainbowed with the vapoury spouts of pods of whales and schools of dolphins swimming beneath. From that time on, each succeeding generation found something new they could quarry to survive.}

Yet is is also a story about redemption and humanity. How do we live a good life? What does a good life look like? How do we measure what a good life is? How do acts of kindness and trauma stay with an individual thoughout their life and how do they pass onto future generations? Then there is the whole idea of the ‘spirit-world’ that Flanagan alludes to with his choices of epigraphs (see below). His near-death experience as a young man, not only gave him a greater, graver sense of the dangers of the wild (for Flanagan, going back to nature is not a comforting, pleasant or easy place to retreat to in times of need) but it also brought him into closer contact with ideas about Fate, destiny and ‘visions’.

Death of a River Guide will haunt me for the rest of my life, already Cosini and Flanagan are mixed up in my mind, and I’m not sure where one begins and the other ends. I tend to be hit or miss with Flanagan’s novels, but this one has had a huge impact. It was very much a case of the right book and exactly the right time.

_{Am I to live? Is my life to be saved? Am I finally to be made visible? Other people who nearly die go down a tunnel and see a great light at the end. But all I have seen are people, the whole lot of them, swirling, dirty, smelly, objectionable and ultimately lovable people, and, I think, if it is to be my misfortune to return into the lamentable physical vessel that has been my body, it is them – these people in the kitchens and office blocks and suburbs and pink leisure suits – that I must make my peace with.}

Epigraphs:

Who Present, Past & Future Sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word,
That walk'd among the ancient trees - William Blake

_{That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions’, the whole so-called ‘spirit-world’, death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the sense with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.}

Rainer Maria Rilke

Cover Love:

In 2023 Penguin Australia refreshed the look of their Flanagan oeuvre. On their website they stated that they had “updated (the) covers with black-and-white photography and bold colour blocking.”

But the designer is unnamed.

ISBN: 9781761048111
Imprint: Penguin
Published: 16th May 2023 (originally published 1994)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Dates Read: 15th - 22nd February 2024

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.