As Richard Flanagan's new novel, The Unknown Terrorist, is published in the UK, the author is interviewed by Stephen Moss in "The Guardian".
"I'm sorry about that," says Flanagan when I mention my post-book depression. "I wanted to make a mirror to what I felt Australia had become. I think it is a pretty bleak country at the moment. It was a land of such hope and possibility when I was younger, and in the past couple of years, like a lot of Australians, I've ended up feeling ashamed of what it had become. But we can't blame governments or parties or politicians; we have to accept in the end it was we as a people who happily went along with this. There was a loss of empathy. I don't know where that comes from. We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion."
...
"He claims he has become a controversialist and polemicist by accident. "A novelist's job is to write good novels -- that's the beginning and end of it, and that's what I strive for. There are writers who wish to be politicians and they corrupt their own writing in the process, but I'm in an unusual situation. I write very little about Australian or Tasmanian politics; it's just that when I do, it seems to get noticed."
