The Journey of the Flower Man

1991

A novel

He is dead, yet he finds himself to be alive.

He has lost his name, so who will he be now?

There is no going back; where will he go?

This is the dilemma that faces the man who is now called the Flower Man.

Where will he go?

Who will he be?

Written while travelling through New Zealand, India, England and Ireland, The Journey of the Flower Man was the first major work produced using the intuitive creative process that I would later come to call “streaming”. Although the novel began with a seed idea and a loose narrative framework, its deeper themes and direction emerged through the act of writing itself.

The story follows a man who awakens after death stripped of his former identity and forced to undertake a journey of physical, spiritual and philosophical transformation. Questions of memory, selfhood, belief and rebirth run throughout the work and would later become central themes in many of my subsequent novels.

The Journey of the Flower Man occupies a pivotal place in my creative development. It was during the later transcription of the manuscript, and through an unexpected connection with the painting Three Snakes, that I first consciously recognised the streaming process that had been guiding my work since childhood. This realisation would eventually lead to The Reclamation and, later, the White Island series.

A good way to describe the making of The Journey of the Flower Man is to quote an excerpt from the 2014 Kindle Introduction:

‘The Journey of the Flower Man is particularly significant to me because it was in the process of transcribing this work that the penny finally dropped. Ever since childhood I had been writing and ‘streaming’, but it was only because of the incident with the painting, Three Snakes that I recognised the process and saw the validity of it.’

Right, my original manuscript, left the transcribed version by Rachel Haynes. We tried to copy my layout as much as possible.