By the time I sit down with Richard Flanagan, he is armed with a glass of champagne. Technically speaking, it is a sparkling white wine from a vineyard in Tasmania, the remote Australian island state that the Booker Prize-winning novelist has lived in for all but three and a bit years of his life. Everyone calls it champagne in Australia but either way, Flanagan is not just drinking it but knocking back hefty swigs of the stuff. “I’ve also got an Armagnac, just to help me along,” he says
I laugh uncertainly. Each to his own and all that, but it is barely 7 o’clock in the morning in Hobart and I had been expecting to see him with at least a slice of toast. So no plans for any sort of food at all? “No,” he says. “I felt nourishment enough, Pilita.” I cannot gripe. He has gallantly agreed to speak on Zoom at what is 8pm my time in England and 7am his. As an Australian transplanted to London, I appreciate the sacrifice. But I glance at the cooling bowl of tagliatelle and bolognese beside my keyboard. It seems rude to eat alone. Luckily, there is a large Negroni next to it. I soon wish I had three of them. It’s not that Flanagan is hard work. Nor is he remotely dull. It’s just that he has a lot to say and some of the frustrations he articulates can be difficult to reconcile with his shimmering literary record. At 59, he has spent nearly 30 years dazzling critics and hoovering up prizes for novels that veer from Australia’s brutal colonial history to one of its greatest 20th-century fraudsters. The book that won the 2014 Man Booker prize, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is about something else again: the notorious Burma Railway built by prisoners of war captured by Japan in the second world war. His new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, is set against a disturbing backdrop of 21st-century climate change, an obsession of his that I share as the FT’s former environment correspondent.
“He Ended Up As Nothing”
Roxane Gay, The Last Day of Disco(rd):
I am tired of reciting all his crimes, misdeeds, and failures. Trump was a cruel, petty tyrant of a president who surrounded himself with similarly terrible people, slobbering sycophants, and political operatives who knew they could advance their agendas so long as they told him what he wanted to hear.
Trump is the living embodiment of shamelessness. He cannot be shamed. He does not care about the 400,000 dead Americans he has barely acknowledged. He does not care about the suffering he has caused. He does not care about anything that happens beyond the country’s borders. He does not care that he has disrupted the peaceful transfer of power. He is a catastrophe and he does not care. His children are exactly like him. His wife is exactly like him. I wish nothing but the very worst for them, for the rest of their days.
Goodbye to Our White Supremacist President
For the occasion of Donald Trump’s last day as President, Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits his essay published in the October 2017 of The Atlantic, The First White President, which argued persuasively that Trump is a white supremacist. In a new introduction, he writes:
It was popular, at the time of Donald Trump’s ascension, to stand on the thinnest of reeds in order to avoid stating the obvious. It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.”
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are — or should be — on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened — that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.