The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution. It used to be that a novel would put you among people, tell you a story or stories, give you some sense of what it might be like to see a different cut-out and perspective of the world: as a schoolteacher, an adulteress, the wife of a member of Parliament, an officer, a cockroach. That’s how I felt reading the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning and almost universally adored (some reviewers reached for their Tolstoy others forbade any comparisons at all) Narrow Road to the Deep North: watching tourists hoaxed by polystyrene. The wicked students piss themselves laughing, the bedraggled victims straggle and angrily bark their way ashore through the rushes. The tourists abandon their vessel, bitterly going over the side with their smartphones and their wallets and their cameras, and next thing the great orb is sitting on the water, maybe 99 per cent above the surface, you never saw anything bobbing like that. They’ve prised it loose, the entire river – the strollers and dawdlers and smoochers along the Backs, the rest of the shipping – seems to be watching in horror as it’s directly threatening a punt-load of Japanese tourists: the looming atrocity is of diplomatic, hemispheric, intercultural dimensions.
A bunch of under-employed post-examinal students are dementedly heaving and levering away at one of the massive ornamental granite balls crowning the parapet of one of the college bridges.
, the Cam is stuffed with expensive punts, which in turn are stuffed with moneyed tourists.
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