morning and all the afternoon, and only came down with the sun’s descent. And all that long time he was in the pine tree Bojan sobbed silently, staring down at that head erupting from the earth at a broken angle, like a snapped flower stem.

Shortly after his wife’s disappearance, Bojan and a crew are being transported to a work site when their truck halts in the woods and they view Maria’s lifeless body hanging in a tree. Once again the memory is penetrating in its grim particularities:

[They gazed] past the battered burgundy shoes to the small, delicate icicles already growing from the coat’s frayed ends, and higher, higher yet, up that snow-rimed scarlet coat and though now giddy with horror still their gaze continued to rise; from the ice-stiffened old grey hemp rope that collared her garrotted neck like a snake-coil of steel; to the white face above it, with lolling tongue and milky, dead eyes.

The result is a life lived hard with a determination not to be touched emotionally. Late in the novel Bojan looks back on his past and views it as a “nightmarish hallucination.” “Life had revealed itself to Bojan Buloh as the triumph of evil,” and now he wages a silent war with that evil, never giving in but believing in its tenacity, until he opens himself to his daughter’s and granddaughter’s love and cautiously admits, “You know the world can only take so much happiness. So much happiness is good, but too much is a very bad thing.”

Sonja inherits the family disposition to sadness, and it would seem that this is a legacy that will steamroll its way through the generations. Like her father, she builds up elaborate psychic armor, and others in the work camp notice how unlike other children she is, a child “who was not like a child at all, but whose face was a mask containing God knows what queer thoughts.” She prides herself on her stoicism during her father’s beatings and realizes that “the idea of love struck her once more as faintly comical, strongly treacherous, and forever elusive.”

Like so many abused children, she sees adults as adversaries and wonders why they are always inexplicably angry at her. Their abuse is gradually transformed into self-loathing and a sense of diminishment. “For she felt guilt in her waking life, felt that all things, most particularly her own self, were her fault, and the fault was one of character, of a person who was ultimately incapable of good.” She feels she is punished simply because she deserves it and that she lacks any essence. “Something had consumed everything Sonja was. . . . She felt as if there was nothing encased within her but ash.” Her only comfort is her determination not to show emotion. “You never cry,’ said Sonja. No matter how bad you feel, you never cry.’”

A theme related to this legacy of anguish is that of history—global and personal. Both father and daughter often meditate on the past; it haunts them in dreams and reasserts itself everywhere. Both have their individual strategies for evasion, but like the water imagery that rains down and drenches everything (many, many scenes are set against torrential downpours), the past is invasive and engulfing. Bojan is obsessed with the war and the memory of his wife’s disappearance, while Sonja wrestles with one recollection after another of domestic strife, and her preference is to become “a stranger to her past.” For her, the nexus of public and private history arrives when she is driving home from work and learns that the Berlin Wall has fallen.

It meant nothing to her, this news, that history, and she sat there enveloped in smoke, both part of and beyond history, forgotten by history, irrelevant to history, yet shaped entirely by it . . . in the end history—like the Berlin Wall—shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational—the great human—forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love.

From this emerges her desire to return home and come to terms with her history.

The chapters are arranged in kaleidoscopic fashion, oscillating between different points of view and dramatic temporal shifts. Through these, Flanagan is able to develop Bojan and his daughter as highly distinct, individual creations, and the fractured sequence mirrors the sense of fragmentation and disruption that blights their lives. However, the technique is overused, and many of the chapters read like set pieces, the work of a miniaturist who cannot find a more coherent structure for his narrative. This restricted scope may be due in part to the fact that the novel was written from the screenplay and film of the same name that Flanagan wrote and directed. Nevertheless, the technique in his hands is distracting, and many scenes are simply duplicative and deserving of trimming or even exclusion.

Flanagan is at his best when creating sharply defined images and motifs. One of the most telling of these is the tiny tea set that Sonja plays with as a child. The day after her mother’s disappearance, some of the neighbor women attempt to distract the child by arranging the set on a box for an imaginary party. The impassive child methodically drops each piece until all are broken, symbols of the fractured lives she and Bojan will live. Those pieces remain with Sonja as an adult, tucked away in her purse and occasionally removed in futile attempts to reassemble them. The suggestion is that once broken, lives may never be repaired. However, the theme of redemption finds expression in these shards when Bojan, during Sonja’s convalescence after giving birth, painstakingly repairs them. “Finally together in one piece, once more complete. She saw that his work was, as ever, true and careful, the few fractures that remained apparent only as hairlines.” Not coincidentally, the tea set is restored at the same time Bojan determines to remain with his daughter and renounce his old life.

Another of these defining images is the edelweiss, flower of love, from Bojan’s homeland. He recalls climbing the mountains to pick these flowers for Maria, and one in particular that he presented to her before their flight to Australia. Their star-shaped petals he likens to points on a compass that mark their direction away from their past and all that has scarred their lives. The night that Maria trudges off in the snow, she packs the odds and ends that define her meager existence, and at the top of her suitcase she places a dried edelweiss. The symbol is now of a dried-up love, and the compass leads only to deeper despair.

A third important image is the Tasmanian dam where Bojan finds work. The project is an ambitious government undertaking, which an official at Bojan’s naturalization ceremony describes in decidedly inflated terms:

“The path to the new Australia is lit not only by the electricity that will come forth from your labours here at Butlers Gorge, but by your conviction that the new world can be better than the old.”

For all the seeming progress, though, the dam is an aging, decaying structure, and on a fateful journey to visit his daughter, Bojan narrowly escapes its collapse in a deluge. The parallel with the Bulohs and other refugees is unmistakable—for all their seeming solidity, they are fragile creations, easily broken and not so easily repaired.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping was awarded the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year award in 1997 and is Flanagan’s second novel. It is a work of undeniable strengths, but one that is also flawed in serious ways. Flanagan’s strength is the depth of his psychological insight, a depth of vision that could be strengthened if the novel were not so overwritten and in places emotionally overwrought.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 96 (December 15, 1999): 757.

The Economist 348 (July 11, 1998): S17.

Library Journal 125 (January, 2000): 158.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 12, 2000, p. 8.

The New York Times Book Review 105 (April 2, 2000): 22.

Publishers Weekly 247 (January 3, 2000): 55.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, May 21, 2000, p. 7.

The Times Literary Supplement, March 13, 1998, p. 22.

The Washington Post Book World, March, 26, 2000, p. 2.

World and I 15 (August, 2000): 246.