AC Grayling defends Booker-winner Richard Flanagan after hatchet job
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Version 0 of 1. The chair of last year’s Man Booker prize judges, AC Grayling, has charged to the defence of the winner, Richard Flanagan, after the Australian’s novel got a scathing write-up in the London Review of Books. In a letter published in the new issue of the literary magazine, the philosopher takes issue with the poet and critic Michael Hofmann’s lengthy take-down of Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which ends by suggesting that the novel should have been consigned to the flames of a barbecue. Grayling writes in his letter that “either Hofmann cannot read, or he has such a narrow and fantastical notion of what a novel should be that he is unable to see quality when it hits him in the face”. Deciding that the review was obviously “written on a bad haemorrhoid day”, Grayling concludes that it must be the former, because “one would fail a first-year for missing the point so comprehensively” in the passages Hofmann cites “in attempted condemnation”. In the review, published last December, Hofmann uses almost 2,500 words to dismiss The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Flanagan’s story about the Australian prisoners of war who built the Burma “Death Railway”. When announcing it as the winner of the Booker prize last autumn, Grayling praised “the beauty of the writing, the profoundly intelligent humanity, the excoriating passages of great power”, calling it “an absolutely superb novel, a really outstanding work of literature”. But according to Hofmann, it represents “the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution”, and is “all bite, and no chew”. It is, writes Hofmann, “a book that says trust me, I’m sensitive, that offers you, repeatedly offers you, all the tender and sensitive things: light, and ‘gas-flame’ eyes, and women’s hands running down your ‘withered’ thigh. But these things are all quoted, all sampled, they are all well-loved items from a catalogue or anthology.” Hofmann attacks one particular passage, about the character Amy’s marriage to Keith, in which Flanagan writes: “It felt like the Edwardian horsehair furniture he had refused her requests to replace after their marriage: sagging, comfortable if one nestled in the soft spots and avoided the hard. He was unselfish and he was kind. But he was not Dorrigo.” Hofmann is not impressed: “Writing like this, commended by reviewers as ‘devastating’ and ‘hugely affecting’ and ‘without an ounce of melodrama’, requires Oscar Wilde’s ‘heart of stone’ to read without laughing.” Flanagan’s writing, he claims, is “overstuffed, and leaks sawdust”. Hofmann concludes his attack with a reference to an anecdote Flanagan shared about burning previous drafts in his barbecue. “I can’t help thinking this wasn’t the right one to spare,” wrote Hofmann. Speaking to the Guardian, Grayling dismissed Hofmann’s write-up as “a tiresome exercise in eristic – being oppositional for the mere sake of it – striking the pose of knowing better than everyone else, the judging panel and practically every other reviewer included”. Thomas Keneally, in the Guardian, called The Narrow Road to the Deep North “a grand examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh and, above all, of how hard it is to live after survival”. The Telegraph praised its “grace and unfathomability”, and the New York Times found it to be “magnificent”, speculating that on rereading, the novel “will seem even more intricate, more carefully and beautifully constructed”. “That makes Hofmann’s review about Hofmann, not Flanagan,” Grayling told the Guardian. “What makes it silly is that the passages he quotes as examples of bad writing backfire on him; he himself cites what refutes his case. I’m all for courageous lonely stances against the herd – but this is not that: it is sticking out the tongue from what I can only guess is a sort of pique or resentment, or animus. Odd.” |