The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Starred review from March 22, 2021
Man Booker winner Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) shines in his fierce, surrealistic look at a family’s dissolution in a recognizable if dystopian Australia that’s ravaged by wildfires. Amid the fires, 56-year-old Anna, an award-winning Sydney architect, makes reluctant trips to Hobart, Tasmania, to check on her mother, Francie. After Francie suffers a catastrophic brain hemorrhage, Anna’s older brother Tommy, an unsuccessful artist who has been shouldering Francie’s care, hopes to let her die in peace. Guilt-ridden over her earlier neglect of her family and unprepared to face her mother’s mortality, Anna instead sides with their younger brother, Terzo, and orders aggressive treatment. Francie begins hallucinating as the increasingly invasive interventions fail, and despite Francie’s delusions, which come through when Francie musters the energy to speak, Anna finds new tenderness in her time with her mother. Meanwhile, Anna’s left ring finger painlessly but inexplicably vanishes, soon followed by a kneecap and a nipple. Though she sees the body parts of others disappearing, too (her 22-year-old son gradually fades away to a few fingers), no one comments or reports on the eerie phenomenon. Amid all of these losses, her complacency about her once rewarding life vanishes. Juxtaposing measured prose with passages that jolt and tumble, and realistic depictions of medical issues with Francie’s phantasmagoric visions (“the mountain plains outside her window full of fires and sandstorms where, nightly, women queued in one area for abortions and in another for orgies, where fleeing people turned into plants only to perish in flames”), Flanagan’s novel illuminates the dangers of taking the world and one another for granted. Its intensity, urgency, and insights are unforgettable.

March 15, 2021
A Tasmanian family grapples with death, extinction, and vanishing limbs. Anna, Terzo, and Tommy Foley have a problem: Their 86-year-old mother, Francie, is dying, and they have to decide whether to let her. This choice pits Anna and Terzo--the "successful" siblings who, having left Tasmania to pursue joyless careers, now feel guilty for having neglected their mother--against Tommy, "a failed artist" who still lives in the Hobart area. Confusing a material existence for a meaningful one, Anna and Terzo demand life-prolonging intervention after life-prolonging intervention. Francie has surgery. She goes on dialysis. She is intubated. Time passes. Francie dwindles and suffers but, in a sense, lives. Meanwhile, Australia is burning, birds are dying, and parts of Anna's body are vanishing. Literally. First her finger. Then her kneecap. Then another finger. Then her whole hand. Gone. "Like the thylacine and the Walkman. Like long sentences. Like smoke-free summers. Gone, never to return." Yet what does Anna do about it? She reaches for her phone and "stare[s] solemnly at her screen," taking a perverse comfort from the dead firefighters and charred songbirds of the Anthropocene extinction. Flanagan's latest is haunted by a central feature of our modern epoch: human denial in the face of social and environmental cataclysm. Yet though Flanagan is justified in his outrage--the natural world is literally disappearing in front of our glazed eyes--he fails to embed his outrage in a convincingly articulated story. With every scene, every character, and every sentence deployed in unabashed support of the book's themes, the novel lacks the narrative verisimilitude it needs to transcend the realm of polemic--a problem exacerbated by Flanagan's summary-heavy style, his refusal to explore any setting, person, or idea with adequate depth or complexity. The disappearance of Anna's body parts, for instance, is barely integrated into the story: She is rarely debilitated by her missing limbs, and the entire phenomenon reads like an overearnest symbol, an errant plot arc that the author, grasping for Gogol-ian profundity, pasted in and forgot to flesh out. Heartfelt though his work is, beautiful though his sentences are, Flanagan has given us an early draft--a fleshy sketch of a denser, better book. A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.

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Starred review from April 15, 2021
Flanagan (First Person, 2018), winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014), uses his latest novel to demand action on the climate crisis. Anna is an architect whose mother, Francie, is nearing the end of her life in Hobart, Tasmania. Anna and her brother Terzo resolve to keep their mother alive against the wishes of their failed artist brother Tommy (the only sibling still in Hobart), medical professionals, and their mother. But then one of Anna's fingers suddenly disappears, and then one knee inexplicably goes missing. She learns that such vanishings are happening across the country, yet no one is speaking of them. Meanwhile, Australia is burning and the updates on Anna's social media feed provide a constant low hum of horror, making the one constant in Anna's life keeping her mother alive. The analogy between the life-support system used to sustain Francie and the current economic system perpetuating environmentally destructive industries may be obvious, and Flanagan's point is not subtle. Unless radical changes are made, we face a bleak, unimaginable world in the near future. Like Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018), this is a timely, unforgettable work of climate fiction, unrelenting in its focus on the horrors of climate change, but one that also offers some hope.

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