Narrow, Repetitive Road

The TLS reviewer says that Richard Flannagan aspires to poetry, and fails dismally, in his Man Booker nominated The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

“The Narrow Road to the Deep North confuses poetry, the higher register, with the trope of repetition – and it is fatal. . . . This is Dorrigo Evans falling in love: ‘He was falling. He listened to the waves break and shimmer sand and he was falling. A slight breeze rose from the long shadows of early morning and he was still falling. He was falling and falling, and it felt a wild freedom . . . . He did not know where it would end.’ Maybe he’s falling. He might be falling. What do you think?” In general, the reviewer claims, Flannagan “has no sense of poetry’s natural, swift economy.”

I rise neither to praise nor condemn Flannagan, whose novel I haven’t finished. But I wonder if the reviewer isn’t guilty of holding Flannagan to a poetics that he simply doesn’t accept. Poetry can be swift and economical; it can be florid. One may prefer one or the other, but on what basis exactly can one say that the economical is poetry and the florid not?