THE LIVING SEA OF WAKING DREAMS
By Richard Flanagan
When the characters in Richard Flanagan’s intriguing new novel look at their phones, the sentences run on without punctuation. It’s a stylistic, reader-focused tic: We join the uninterrupted stream of photos and headlines from the catastrophic wildfires that scorched Australia a little over a year ago. We glide past “incinerated kangaroos in fetal clutches of fencing wire charred koalas burnt bloated cattle on their backs.”
Or maybe we pause the scroll as Anna, a successful architect who is the book’s protagonist, registers “a south coast town at 8 in the morning pitch black except for a sickly red glow when the glow comes you know you have to go.”
That uneasy choice — to skim and ignore or to slow down and think — captures what Flanagan is up to with his eighth novel, “The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.” It is partly a family drama about three middle-aged siblings trying to save their mother from dying, but mostly it’s a cry of alarm about what we choose to pay attention to — and what gets lost in the scramble for success and tasteful design.
[ Read an excerpt from “The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.” ]
Flanagan, often described as Australia’s greatest living novelist, wants us to reconsider our real and digital surroundings. He turns climate change’s harsh realities into rivers of words, and also magical visions. Whole landscapes vanish in the novel without anyone seeming to care, but so, curiously, does Anna, bit by bit, starting with her fingers.
The result is a beguiling book that takes time to settle but is hard to forget. It feels at first like a dizzying collage — newspaper tear sheets and family snapshots pasted onto a Salvador Dalí canvas. Viewed from one angle, it is Flanagan’s “climate change novel,” his first fictional attempt to channel the fury of earlier essays condemning Australia’s leaders for downplaying the damage of a warming planet while mining heaps of coal.
But in the end, like Flanagan’s best work (he won the Booker Prize in 2014 for “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”) the novel grounds itself in humane ideals. Love. Hope. Dignity. These values emerge as if they were part of the mystery, slowly, with clues that pile up behind a curtain of flames.
The story begins with Anna and her two brothers, Tommy and Terzo, trying to decide what to do about their mother, Francie, who has been rushed to a Tasmania hospital after a near-fatal brain bleed. Terzo, the third child of the family, is a wealth manager of solid certainty who insists that death must be fought. Anna, whose hand is disappearing for reasons unknown, is terrified and repulsed by her mother’s toggling between life and death, but she cannot resist the urge to assert control.
Then there’s Tommy, a struggling artist with a stutter, who has never had much interest in climbing the achievement ladder. He’s the one who had been taking care of 87-year-old Francie, but when his more accomplished siblings agree to use whatever power and money they have to keep her alive, he does little more than acquiesce. Something is broken in him, in all of them. Maybe it has to do with another sibling, who died when they were young. Or maybe it’s something more.
“The Living Sea of Waking Dreams,” like Jonathan Franzen’s best novels, quietly traces a societal rift around wealth and what amounts to a “good life.” After 30 years of strong economic growth, which not even the coronavirus pandemic has done much to dent, Australia is now, per capita, one of the wealthiest nations in the world, if not the wealthiest.
Many Australians are still not sure how to feel about that. The gap in lifestyle and outlook between Francie and Tommy on one side and Anna and Terzo on another can be found in countless families and suburbs, with impacts on the country and the national psyche that are rarely examined. Flanagan does well here to at least try, beginning with the losses and anxieties that accompany greater comfort.
The land and sea, in his telling, are the first and most visible victims.
Tommy, the conscience of the family, can hardly stand the ruin of Tasmania, an island at the bottom of the earth, with “beaches covered in crap, wild birds vomiting supermarket shopping bags, a world disappearing.” Some of Flanagan’s descriptions carry a similarly bitter tone. On her phone, Anna slides right on past platypuses and lyre birds in danger of extinction and a burned koala screaming on Facebook. But there is sadness astride the outrage, like ash after a blaze.
“The Living Sea of Waking Dreams” is especially strong when its characters — and the reader — actually linger to lament what’s gone or going: Christmas beetles with “gaudy metallic shells”; emperor gum moths, with their “powdery Persian rug wings”; or orange-bellied parrots, as small as “flying teacups.”
The vanishing animals carry more emotional weight than the strange loss of Anna’s body parts, or the money that her video-gaming son may be stealing. The natural world is Flanagan’s muse, and his heartbreak at its demise never fades, in part because it’s not the only thing to suffer when people become “remarkably unobservant.” Also endangered are the values that keep families together, that keep societies together.
Francie bears the brunt of that failure to pay attention. Anna and Terzo, high on their own urbane self-regard, simply refuse to let her go, insisting on every treatment possible regardless of medical advice or cruelty. They love their mother. But they cannot quite make sense of someone who had less and expected less: “Francie had come of age in a world where the self — its problems, its needs, its desires and its vanities — was not accorded the primacy of time or the dignity of reflection for people of her lowly class.”
So Francie endures, and the gap between her children widens. Anna insists her mother did not live a good life because she was not free to chase her dreams. Tommy “felt Francie found meaning in what she had.” He saw her life “as a triumph of her will against the odds: a woman who never allowed her circumstances to reduce her.”
If there is hope in “The Living Sea of Waking Dreams” — and in interviews, Flanagan has said there is — it may be found in that simple admonition. Look extinction in the face and find meaning in what we have left. Human failure cannot be solved when we’re scrolling, lost in our dreams, or when the air is tobacco brown. What we see, stream and share will never matter as much as the lives and landscapes we can observe, contemplate and touch.
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Book Review: ‘The Living Sea of Waking Dreams,’ by Richard Flanagan - The New York Times
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