RICHARD WRIGHT'S INVISIBLE MAN
It’s hard to find nice things to say about a pandemic, but if nothing else, it offers an opportunity for people to rethink the way they live. Lockdowns and working from home, for example, resulted in reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Whether that trend continues as the world reemerges after a year of darkness remains to be seen.
Concerns about climate change and other types of manmade devastation drive the narrative, albeit unevenly, of “The Living Sea of Waking Dreams,” the latest novel by Richard Flanagan, the Australian author who won the Booker Prize in 2013 for “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.”
As any good writer will tell you, the key to universality is specificity. Flanagan presents his themes on the degradation of the planet through the surreal story of one Tasmanian family. In an unnamed time one assumes to be the present — in a typical phrase, one character laments “more news noise more frogs and snakes dying out, more brexittrump climatecoal more and more”— Australia experiences a prolonged stretch of no rain and endless fires, with rainforests turning into “dry struggling woodlands.”
Fifty-six-year-old Anna is a celebrated Sydney architect, the divorced mother of an adult son who spends most of his time “in cyberspace in his bedroom.” Early in the novel, she says she doesn’t know “how the vanishing began.” She refers not to climate change but to her 86year-old mother, Francie, who is dying in a Hobart hospital and is prone to hallucinations.
Anna is one of four siblings. Like brother Terzo, a venture capitalist, she lives outside of Tasmania and has had little to do with their mother’s care. Only brother Tommy, a failed artist who still lives near home, visits Francie regularly and tends to her needs. Their fourth sibling, Ronnie, died at 14.
Flanagan writes movingly of Anna’s feelings of guilt, both over spending little time with Francie and over Ronnie’s death. To assuage that guilt, she sides with Terzo when he argues that Francie must be kept alive at all costs. No treatment is too risky, he feels. Tommy disagree sand prefers to respect their mother’s wishes when she says, feebly, that she wants to die.
But this isn’t Anna’s only
dilemma, nor are Francie’s faculties the only things that are vanishing. In a surreal twist, Anna loses body parts. First, the ring finger of her left hand disappears. Next goes her left knee, turning her leg into “a tapered sausage, stiffened by one long bone with rubber at its pivot point.” More follow. Odder still: No one seems to notice.
And that’s part of the problem with “The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.” Flanagan makes his points too obviously. That no one notices the missing body parts parallels the unseen harm humans do to the climate, but it has little to do with the family story and is ineffective as a parable. And that’s before one considers Anna’s remarkable agility for someone who eventually loses a hand, an eye, and more. The same problem is true for a tacked-on subplot involving orange-bellied parrots, birds in the wilds of southwestern Tasmania that are in danger of extinction.
Yet Flanagan’s poetic prose and rigorously argued points make this novel hard to dismiss. At its strongest, the book poses an important question: What constitutes dignity? The question is applicable as much to one’s right to die on one’s terms as to the dignity of the planet. How do our actions and motivations compromise the health of those around us? It’s a question a year of unrelenting darkness has made all the more critical.