The Tiger, Anna’s grandmother, beats her daughter Francie to assuage the guilt of unmarried pregnancy. But it is also a source of reverberating cruelty. It shapes the interior landscapes of the older generation, a structure and comfort for getting through the hardships of settler life. Roman Catholicism is touched on throughout. Social media both frame the ecological crisis and increasingly become an extension of Anna herself. We learn of the bushfires’ devastation mainly through Anna’s social-media feeds, which she accesses to zone out of family commitments. There was just a vanishing.”įlanagan wrote the novel in 2016, during the Tasmanian bushfires, and then updated it the next year when bushfires raged across Australia. “Between her little finger and her middle finger, where her ring finger had once connected to her hand, there was now a diffuse light, a blurring of the knuckle joint, the effect not unlike the photoshopping of problematic faces, hips, thighs, wrinkles and sundry deformities, with some truth or other blurred out of the picture. The magic realist device of “vanishings” also works to tie the personal and broader ecological extinction stories. “It was like living with a chronically sick smoker except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its fouled and collapsing lungs.” Returning to the matrix of unfolding relationships, with insight and back story on why the characters behave as they do, is like stepping away from a mosaic, diagram guide now in hand, and seeing the entire image for the first time.Ĭlimate change and wildlife extinction is deftly woven into a story of familial bonds and end-of-life care, and works as a broader canvas supporting the central narrative. On finishing the novel, the desire go back to the beginning is overwhelming: to reread the crazy-paving introduction made up of interior dialogue and characters‘ observations, mixed in with the action at the matriarch Francie’s hospital bedside. The opening chapter, fragmented into 22 sections, lays out Flanagan’s bargain with the reader: that, if we persevere, all these facets will form part of a satisfying whole. Ostensibly, The Living Sea is told from the viewpoint of a successful architect, Anna, and is anchored in present-day Australia, but both the point of view and timeframe are malleable. But the concern with eco disaster and the use of magic realism in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams marks it out as a departure from the emotional power and straightforward parallel narratives of the earlier work. RICHARD FLANAGAN’s Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of this century’s best novels.
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