richard flanagan the living sea of waking dreams

Flanagan refigures his characters, literally, just as our species has refigured the planet. And she’s not the only one gradually being erased.Įrasure is a running theme in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams: missing digits, a beloved teenager long dead, eroded relationships, an imaginary world, the real one going up in flames. Then Anna notices that parts of her own body have disappeared, painlessly, leaving a pixelated blur-first a finger, then a knee. In lucid moments, Francie drones on about magical creatures-animals morphing into plants, one-eyed CIA agents, a witch-outside her hospital window. Anna and Terzo leave only to turn back to Hobart, summoned by Tommy’s frantic texts. One of the novel’s many marvels is how Flanagan persuasively depicts Francie seesawing between flatlining to recovery and back again. Reading Flanagan is like watching Federer at Wimbledon: he can do pretty much anything on the page and make it look easy, elegant. The three siblings, as well as the infirm Francie, all orbit an emotional black hole: the death of their brother, the golden boy Ronnie, who mysteriously hanged himself at fourteen. Her youngest brother, Terzo, a wealthy, possibly corrupt trader, flies in from Brisbane to join Anna and their brother Tommy, a flailing artist with a stutter and a child with schizophrenia, who has remained in Hobart as Francie’s caretaker even though he can barely take care of himself. Her eldest child and only daughter, Anna, Flanagan’s middle-aged protagonist, is called back from her architecture firm in Sydney-away from her partner Meg and troubled son, Gus, whom she has raised as a single mother-to her hometown. And the indigenous fauna took a devastating hit: images of charred kangaroos circulated on social media, and at least 30,000 koalas perished, with many more maimed.Īgainst this backdrop the Booker Prize-winning writer Richard Flanagan sets his gorgeous, mesmerizing new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, connecting Australia’s ecological cataclysm with the anomie of a Tasmanian family, as Francie, the eighty-six-year-old matriarch, drifts toward death in a Hobart hospital. During the summer of 2019–2020, unprecedented heat and freakish storms sparked massive wildfires that scorched millions of acres from the outback to the coasts.

Just before COVID-19, Australia was burning to the ground. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan

Richard flanagan the living sea of waking dreams