THE LIVING SEA OF WAKING DREAMS
RICHARD FLANAGAN Chatto & Windus, £16.99 pp282
Richard Flanagan’s latest got a rave review from Beejay Silcox in the Guardian: ‘It combines the moral
in the Scotsman thought it ‘certainly ambitious, powerful in its descriptions of drought, bush fires, impending environmental disaster; to this extent certainly a novel for our troubled times.’
Jon Day in the Financial Times had doubts. ‘There are really two novels here. The first is a carefully observed account of an everyday family tragedy. Siblings Anna, Tommy and Terzo are waiting for their mother Francie to die. Anna is an architect, Tommy a failed artist turned fisherman, Terzo an investment banker. Another brother, Ronnie, killed himself when he was a teenager, and his death haunts the family.’
The magic-realist sub-plot involving bits dropping off a woman’s body came in for some criticism. Massie thought it ‘irritating and silly’ and in the Spectator, Amanda Craig agreed. ‘When Anna finally realises that “they had not been expelled from Eden ... they had expelled Eden from themselves”, even the most sympathetic reader may find themselves thinking: I couldn’t care less.’ righteousness of a fable, the wounded grief of a eulogy, and the fury of someone who still reads the news.’ The Telegraph’s Sam Leith more or less agreed: ‘It’s a threnody to a world in which our connections to nature, beauty and the human values of a less mediated past are being steadily chewed up by the march of monetised technology.’
Other reviewers proceeded with caution. The main plot concerns a family at the deathbed of their mother against the background of ecological destruction. Allan Massie