Flanagan falls flat with a third-rate tale

Fiction First Person By Richard Flanagan Chatto & Windus, €24

Richard Flanagan’s previous novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, won the Man Booker Prize in 2014. This was not a decision welcomed in all corners. Michael Hofmann, writing in the London Review of Books, held The Narrow Road up as an example of “the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution”, before going on to call it “entitled”, “cartoonish” ...