![]() ![]() ![]() It's risky territory, this, bordering on stereotype and sentimentality, but Flanagan is careful with his characters, layering them in such a way that our understanding of them is incremental. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter.'' ![]() They were already ''survivors of grim, pinched decades'', who had been left with ''this irreducible minimum: a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. These are the men who, as slave-prisoners, had to forge codes of survival. ''They are bank clerks and teachers, counter johnnies, piners and short-price runners, susso survivors, chancers, larrikins, yobs, tray men, crims, boofheads and tough bastards blasted out of a depression that had them growing up in shanties and shacks without electricity, with their old men dead or crippled or maddened by the Great War and their old women making do on aspro and hope, on soldier settlements, in sustenance camps, slums and shanty towns, in a nineteenth-century world that had staggered into the mid-twentieth century.'' With less rhetorical mannerism than Cormac McCarthy, but an equivalent ability to animate the specifics of place and time in an operatic sentence, he gives us a context, a demotic history for his characters, these men who went, hapless, to war: ![]()
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