Out of the cage

IF he could, Richard Flanagan would learn Spanish. Then, he says, he’d read Faulkner the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American boom writers did.

“Do you know which novel of his influenced them the most?” Flanagan asks, flashing a strong, good smile. “It’s not what you’d expect. It was ‘The Wild Palms.’ Borges translated it. Can you imagine? Faulkner by way of Borges? I wish I could see what he did.”

Discreetly drinking a smuggled bottle of beer on the patio at UCLA’s Faculty Center, Flanagan has just finished his panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where he discussed his new novel, “The Unknown Terrorist.” He’s by turns jocular and thoughtful as he ponders his triptych -- “Death of a River Guide,” “The Sound of One Hand Clapping,” “Gould’s Book of Fish” -- and his effort with “Terrorist” to strike out in a new direction.

Flanagan, in his relationship to his native Tasmania and in his narrative techniques, has long been compared with Faulkner. Asked if he tires of hearing this, his voice grows soft. It’s an honor, he says, even though “all comparisons really tend to be forms of incomprehension.” Holding a volume of Faulkner’s early novels in his hand, he says his debt is clear: “Faulkner came from a benighted Southern state, and he went back there and wrote as best, and as truthfully, as he could about it. I come from a benighted Southern state, and his example showed me that it must be possible if I just didn’t give up.”

To push the Faulkner comparison a little further -- at the risk of having him mutter and roll his icy blue eyes -- “The Unknown Terrorist” seems to fit in Flanagan’s oeuvre the way “Sanctuary” does in Faulkner’s. Both peer into the grimy, seedier corners of their contemporary worlds; both are less charged by the epic-sounding narrative voice in the authors’ other works, though the dazzling use of language is still on display. Both involve innocents -- Faulkner’s Temple Drake, Flanagan’s the Doll -- whose lives are drastically changed by encountering dangerous people.

The writing of “Terrorist” sounds daunting -- more daunting, in some ways, than paddling Tasmania’s Franklin River, which the 45-year-old Rhodes scholar has done many times. A grueling draft process. Back-and-forths with his editor about the novel’s prologue and all its provocative statements (“Jesus is history’s first ... suicide bomber” is one). Expectations that he’d write another “Gould’s Book of Fish.”

“I realized I had to sort of destroy what I’d done, or ... be destroyed by it,” he says. “The history of literature is littered with people who write a book that has a certain uniqueness to it. And everything they write thereafter is, well, just a footnote to that work.”

“The Unknown Terrorist” offers a glimpse of a writer as he superbly remakes his art and avoids this fate. “Kafka writes somewhere that a cage went in search of a bird,” he says. “I didn’t want the cage to be ‘Gould’s Book of Fish.’ I wanted to keep on flying.”

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nick.owchar@latimes.com