The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan is a topical and thought-provoking novel encompassing relationships, dying and aging, grief and trauma, the environment.

I loved this author's The Narrow road to the Deep North which was about hate and cruelty but also about love and compassion. It had the best depiction of love at first sight I had ever read.

However i have now tried reading the beginning of this book 4 times. I have varied the times because sometimes it's not the book you want to read at that particular time. However apart from picking up that there is something possibly about a climate crisis that has even reached Tasmania, I have found this book to be impenetrable and have conceded defeat.
Thank you for my ARC and I am sorry I couldn't get on with this book but am sure many others will love it.

In his most recent novel, Flanagan tackles the state of the modern day world, exploring and exposing the cruelty we inflict on nature and on each other. The writing style is both Cormac McCarthy-esque and Steinbeckian, whilst the magical realism employed in this novel works perfectly as an allegory.

A strange mesmerising and beautiful book. Exactly what one would expect from Richard Flanagan. Very topical issues of age, ageing, and dying fast or slow.

This book follows three siblings faced with a terrifying prospect, their Mother dying.
But even if she is ready for peaceful death they are not ready for loosing her and won't let her go.
The siblings can't control the devastating environmental destruction going on around them but they want to try control this situation.
The author really handles some powerful emotions, family tragedy and earth tragedy.
It shines a spot light on frustration, anger, grief and powerlessness and it's philosophical angle leaves you with plenty to think about and analyse. It's clever and it's direct.
My thanks go to the author, publisher and Netgalley in providing this arc in return for my honest review.

Let me start by saying that the author is the king of antithesis and dialectical reasoning. He’s convinced me that if to be OR not to be is the question, then to be AND not to be is the answer.

The more sense one tries to get from the text, the more one realises that it makes no sense at all. Like life itself - absolutely full of pain and suffering, most of it self-imposed, evidently.

It’s interesting how one of the characters says that “it was as though everyone was using words to avoid using words for what words were used for”. Beautiful, and absolutely precise in today’s reality.

Unfortunately, even when we realise all that, as the author puts it, “dying – as Francie was hoping to, futilely attempting to escape life – was many, many things. But, mostly, it was hard work”.

Consequently, “today was frightening. Tomorrow was terrifying, if we made it that far”. Indeed!

The book tells the story of Anna and her two brothers, middle-aged adults living in Australia and Tasmania. They are taken out of the daily routine when their mother, aged 87, gets very ill and she is caught between her body’s desire to die and her children’s determination that she lives.
But there is also a higher level sickness, situated in the background of the story – the sickness of Earth. Land burning, species of animals disappearing. The story takes place during the massive Australian bushfires from 2019-20202.

I have mixed feelings about this book. While I cannot say I loved it, I am glad I read it. It is a moving story, not easy to read. The theme of the book is saddening – sickness of family members and of Earth. We read about the everyday family tragedy, but also about the global tragedy that we are witnessing in real life.

Flanagan manages to transmit powerful emotions (anger, grief) – this story had an impact on me while reading the it. The narrative style, at times similar to streams of consciousness, contributed to a very direct and powerful transmission of the emotions. It is definitely not a book for fans of action-oriented stories.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about grief, anger, and a vanishing world. A slow but sure collapse. It is one of the most anchored to reality fiction books I read in a while, and also one of the most touching and surreal stories.

Francie lies in a hospital bed, she is old and is suffering but her three children are insistent that all attempts are made to keep her awake. High-flying Anna has to balance caring for her mother with dealing with her layabout son and all around her things are disappearing, material things, parts of her body and then parts of other people. Terzo is guilty about the suicide of his brother but in becoming materially successful he has become lonely. Tommy, the youngest, is seen as a failure by his siblings. As bushfires rage, the climate gets warmer and species become extinct, Francie fades.
I really like Flanagan's writing, he has a knack of producing very hypnotic prose that sucks the reader in. Here there are lots of very deep areas explored - superficially the care of the elderly, more deeply different forms of stress affecting mid-lifers and more profoundly the human impact on the environment. This multi-layered approach is really clever and one can almost forgive the rather 'psychedelic' passages.

'And when the first famines began, they were elsewhere, and the growing numbers of wars were elsewhere, the atrocities and horrors were elsewhere, and elsewhere is always the fault of others.'

The new novel from Australia's Richard Flanagan pulls no punches. It is an angry novel, beautifully written, seething beneath the surface. And that, for me, was the issue... But first:

The story of Francie and her three surviving children, who bicker and argue about how the doctors should look after their ailing mother, who over the course of the novel suffers strokes, infections and numerous other incapacities which mean her quality of life is deteriorating and she is trapped in a cycle of hospital and respite care. To escape the horrors of the reality of her family, Anna - the daughter, through whom we see most of the book - immerses herself in social media, full of images of the Australian bush fires but somehow entirely disconnected to the real world. Soon parts of Anna start to disappear: her finger, her hand, her knee... And she realises that others, too, are missing parts of their bodies, but no-one mentions it, no-one particularly notices.

The main theme of the novel is not just the family relationships, but how they become a metaphor for how we look after (Mother) Earth. The vanishings are clearly meant to symbolise the habitats and species that are dying out around the planet but which we don't necessarily see. Which is fine. I get it, and if it had been handled sensitively and with less vehemence then it would have worked much better for me. As it is, not only do we get the insistence on ramming home the message, but then we are told 'LOOK AT THE MESSAGE, SEE WHAT I'M TELLING YOU.'

I started off really enjoying the book, drawn in by the wonderful opening lines, and the sheer skill of Flanagan's prose. But then I started to realise that I wasn't enjoying it anymore. And then I got the image of a thrash metal band in my head, the kind where the lead singer is sooo angry and shouting that you can't actually make the words out, it's just a screaming noise, but you just know he's not really happy with his life. That's what I felt this book was: shouty. Well-written, but shouty.

It's my opinion only, and others clearly love the book, so make of it what you will. The message is an important one, and heck, maybe it takes a book like this to hit someone about the head so much that they actually DO something about climate change and the mess we have made of our planet. Maybe the soft, reassuring tones of Sir David Attenborough aren't enough anymore, and we do need to shout louder. But there are ways, and then there are ways. I just wish I could have enjoyed it more. 2.5 stars from me, rounded up to 3 because Flanagan is a genuinely good writer.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

I'm afraid that I do not like this kind of writing style, which lacks quotations marks and has a vague 'stream of consciousness' feel to it. I'm sure many others will find it far more interesting or compelling than I did,

Following the devastating Australian bush fires last year, Flanagan writes what amounts to a SCREAM on climate change and global warming that is harsh, unsettling and unique.
Vocabulary and description aren't enough to convey the immensity of the disaster - hence words are repeated, dropped and grasped for. Sentences are searching for words and a stream of alternatives to convey the message. Flanagan brilliantly depicts the intensity of the Australasian fires - the dense smoke, the dry and the devastation.
Flanagan uses a personification and anthropomorphic Gaia allegory to convey the situation:
Anna, Tommy and Terzo are the grown-up brothers and sisters of mother Francine. Their mother becomes increasingly ill as her health deteriorates with "a depressing and gathering mudslide of complications".
Refusing to let her die, more and more support machines are introduced to keep her alive.
Anna and Terzo are in the high income bracket and don't want to put in the time to look after their mother. Instead they fly in when summoned.
At the same time as Australian marsupials and the last Suamtran rhino vanish, Anna loses a finger. She is distressed that nobody seems to notice. Flanagan strikes at social media, where the images of burning koalas, flooding Indian villages and collapsing glaciers stack up but are scrolled past for more palatable input. "The losing of body parts becomes normalised and accepted with dispassionate, detached interest."
"Perhaps the more the essential world vanished, the more people needed to fixate on the inessential world."
An astonishing, excoriating book that demands to be read widely.

This is a book that filled me with growing horror as I read through it, Anna, Terzo and Tommy are three adult siblings who are faced with the prospect of their mother dying. Their fight to keep her alive ties in with their fears and doubts about the changing world as it plummets into self-destruction.

Mostly seen through Anna's eyes, we see her struggle with her brothers, her son and her girlfriend as she tries and fails to articulate her feelings with some alarming consequences.

There's a great play on the power of words and the powerlessness of the human condition, and the book draws you in with its fragmentary approach and half-seen truths.

It's an ambitious book that sometimes doesn't quite hit the mark with some of the characters and descriptions, but overall it packs a very powerful punch in its vision of a terrifying future.

The world is dying, as is the mother of Tommy, Anna and Terzo. Only, they won't let her. They can't seem to let go of life. Probably because outside the hospital the world is is horrible: species are dying because of climate change, forest fires rage and people's body parts start disappearing. Life seems to consist only of superficial stuff and social media. People aren't really interested in each other anymore and don't seem to notice each other.
Not a very positive novel, I'm afraid, but I found it a very interesting, inspiring and philosophical take on a vanishing world.
Thank toy Random House UK and Netgalley for the ARC.

A beautiful mediation on life, dying and the disconnect people begin to experience from the world around them as it falls apart.

A Guardian article quotes Flanagan describing his latest novel as "a rising scream", which feels pretty accurate to me. The story follows Francie, an elderly women who is hospitalised after her health begins to fail. Her children - Anna, Tommy and Terzo - gather to be at her beside and make decisions on her future. From here Flanagan uses Francie's situation (and, by extension, that of her children and their children) to examine big questions relating to morality, ageing and contemporary society. I'll avoid going into too much more detail for fear of giving away any spoilers but trust me -- this is impressive stuff.

To call the novel thought-provoking or life affirming feels trite; in fact any description doesn't quite convey how strong of a novel this is. Suffice to say I expect to see this on many prize lists next year. Highly recommended.

For me, Flanagan is a patchy writer who doesn't quite know where to stop and the best and worst of his approach is on show here. I loved the concept of disappearing body parts which opens the book, and the oppositional themes of disappearance and excess (extinction and conservation vs. too many tourist, too much capital, too many artificial medical interventions to prevent the disappearance of an aged parent into death) give an interesting figurative structure to the text. But while I appreciated this, I found the book a chore to read - it didn't engage me at the plot or story level and the message, while important and worthy, is hardly new. Too much becomes polemic and, for me, I could admire this is parts but can't honestly say that I enjoyed it.

Richard Flanagan's remarkably thoughtful novel is both challenging and illuminating, with its elements of magical realism, dwelling on the destruction, devastation and extinctions of the natural world globally, such as the out of control bush fires burning in Australia, and the parallels to be found on a more personal level in the dysfunctions of a family and a refusal to come to terms with the natural circles of life and death. 87 year old Francie is suffering from a brain bleed in a Hobart hospital, with her children, the kind and compassionate Tommy, the artistic failure who had stayed, the middle aged Anna, the architect and Terzo, the venture capitalist, both of whom had fled Tasmania. There was another son, Ronnie, who committed suicide after being abused in this family of distant relationships, buried feelings and emotions, silences, trauma, and grief.

Tommy wants to let his mother slip away, however, Anna and Terzo are disdainful of Tommy, robust in their determination to keep Francie alive with any medical interventions, irrespective of her wishes, leaving Francie in misery and despair, looking out of the window at the world, the horrors and the dreams. The main focus in the story is on Anna, the invisible older woman with a son, Gus, who has disconnected from her. As Anna sits by the bedside of her mother, her body parts start to slowly disappear, something Anna begins to accommodate and barely notice. A metaphor used by the author to highlight humanity's blindness to what matters on a individual and family level, and on a more wider level in our environment, as people seek distractions with their addictions to social media, TV, other trivia, even pursuing ambitions at the cost of family, families who cannot truly hear or see each other.

Flanagan is a perceptive writer with his timeless themes, expressing grief, rage and sorrow at what has unthinkingly been allowed to happen to our earth, a planet on we are dependent on for our very existence, and on the pain, fear and fault lines to be found within families, the inability to let go and accept the natural rhythms of life and death, unable to connect with each other and genuinely communicate. Despite the dark, sad and bleak narrative, there is hope to be found in it, if we can only learn to pay attention to the actual things and people that matter, and take care of each other and our beautiful, delicately balanced, world. A profound, moving, pertinent and timely read that I think will appeal to many readers. Many thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC.

I have previously read four of Flanangan’s novels, of which I really enjoyed three (Gould’s Book of Fish, Death of a River Guide, and First Person) and struggled with the fourth (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). I went into this book convinced from the title and the brief details I had read about it that I would love it. The title makes it sound like it will be atmospheric and, well, dream-like. And I had heard that it dealt with some environmental and conservation issues, which, as a nature photographer, is subject matter close to my heart.

Unfortunately, I have to report that I was disappointed with the actual experience of reading the book.

I would be the first to acknowledge that this is personal taste and what didn’t work for me will be a 5-star read for another person, so these comments are not about the quality of the book (some of the writing is excellent), but just about my feelings as I read.

The main focus of the novel is the prolonged death of Francie, mother to three children, Anna (through whom we experience the book), Terzo and Tommy. There is also a fourth child who is not physically present in the book for reasons that we learn about as the book progresses. Anna and Terzo make a decision early on that they will do whatever it takes to keep their mother alive (Tommy is not sure this is a good idea) and so we follow a whole series of medical interventions that see Francie diminished and degraded as her children refuse to let her die naturally.

Then there’s Anna’s life away from her mother including her relationship with Meg and with her son, Gus.

Then there’s a magical realism element that captures the headlines in the book blurbs as first parts of Anna and then parts of other people start to disappear. This aspect of the book really didn’t work for me.

These elements of the story play out against a backdrop of natural disasters in Australia as fires burn and climate change causes havoc. We see a lot of this in the form of social media articles/tweets that Anna looks at, and the distraction of social media plays an important part in the book not just in terms of events but also in the actual form of the narrative. I think in an attempt to simulate the bombardment we all receive day by day from various social media streams and the multiple information sources around us, there are passages in the book where the sentences run out of control and blend together:

"She looked at her phone she checked Instagram she read professors of health were calling for cities to be readied for mass evacuation Indigenous people fearing central Australia is becoming too hot for humans towns running out of water Australia ending its hottest year ever while someone was saying that it wasn’t, that official weather records had been forged to make Australia look colder in the past and hotter now."

Some of these passages are beautifully poetic:

"Go with them, Mum, he was saying, you can now now everything is forgotten time is forgotten us and time forgotten this bed and window and the witch and Constantine forgotten even this feeling forgotten if you go with the old people Francie go hear Ronnie laugh see your father ploughing red soil opening like a gift your father kneeling stories of miracle stories of birds stories of sun and colour and light you can go with them Mum they’re waiting we’ll meet you there."

And some make little or no sense even after repeated readings (to be fair, if you read them a few times and make up your own punctuation, you can get some sense out of them):

"Tales told by idiots were where what doctors making less and less sense who came next who?"

For me, these passages were the best and the worst of the book. I loved them when I came across them, but they seem to be used at random or when the author suddenly realised he hadn’t done one for a while. A whole book like this would have fitted the “waking dreams” expectation set by the title, but I found their almost random appearances too infrequent and, consequently, jarring.

There are lots of messages about conservation, extinction, salving consciences by spending money, making wrong decisions about where to focus efforts, when love stops being love and becomes selfishness etc. etc.. There’s a dominant theme about engaging with the world, with society, not via social media, but directly. Don’t try to hide away from the real world because it is full of beauty that is endangered and damaged.

I really wanted to love this book. I found the story of Anna and her relationships with Meg and Gus the most engaging parts. I found it hard to engage with the story of Francie (which is most of the book), which makes me sound unsympathetic and callous because it is such a sad story. And, as already mentioned, I couldn’t get to grips with the magical realism element which I found a distraction. I wanted more of the dream-like poetic prose. Maybe then I would have fallen in love with it like I wanted to.

"One of the most spectacularly incoherent novels ever to reach print”

When sci-fi writer Brian Stableford used this phrase to describe Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm, it earned the book, and the phrase, an entry in Wikipedia’s List of Books Considered the Worst Ever Written ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_considered_the_worst).

But Richard Flanagan would regard that label as a mark of success, saying in an interview to mark this book “Novels when they succeed are incoherent and contradictory and mysterious. Nothing is more secondary to a writer’s achievements than their original ambition.”
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/29/richard-flanagan-despair-is-always-rational-but-hope-is-human)

Although here incoherence appears to be the original and deliberate ambition.

The novel’s title is taken from a poem by John Clare (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43948/i-am), who was also the part inspiration for Gould’s book of fish (“I am inspired by the unfinished biography if the 19th century peasant poet John Clare”, as per Flanagan’s original proposal for Gould’s Book of Fish to Pan Macmillan).

But the “Waking Dreams” experienced by the dying Francie is a rather minor part of the novel that follows, and one that feels rather bolted on and soon forgotten.

Flanagan’s concerns about climate change and, particularly in an Australian 2019-20 context, bushfires, rather dominate the tone of the novel, which at times can be polemical, although again they are relatively incidental to the plot. See his article in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/05/tasmania-is-burning-the-climate-disaster-future-has-arrived-while-those-in-power-laugh-at-us)

At times the narrative voice lurches into grumpy old leftie male, railing against, inter alia, airbnb, TED talks and tourists. While the narrative PoV is largely Anna, a successful architect, the voice seems more to channel Tommy, her brother, a commercially unsuccessful artist, and the only one of three siblings still to live in Tasmania.

The most powerful part of the novel, and its ostensible (© Gumble’s Yard) narrative thread, concerns the prolonged death of Anna, Tommy and Terzo’s mother Francie, one prolonged by the medical interventions demanded by the two siblings. Flanagan uses this as an excuse for some upper-middle class bashing, Terzo in particular a caricature of a venture capitalist, explaining in the Guardian interview on the novel:

"The catalyst for this book came from one of my daughters and a story she told me from her workplace. She works in a hospital, and there was an old man who had been admitted, who was dying and ready to die. But his family were wealthy and privileged and powerful. And they wouldn’t allow it. And somehow it offended them."

And Terzo’s colleagues, as successful people in financial services, in the novel’s worldview clearly have no souls:

"But soon enough the talk swung from Terzo to the traditional lamentations of venture capitalists. Everyone seemed to relax a little everyone agreed excessive financial regulation red tape green tape red the government must incentivise funding must support value creation must deregulate must regulate R&D tax incentives must fast-track visas for software engineers must get the hell out of business must! must! must! And once warmed up and relaxed they talked fin-tech and ag-tech and ed-tech law-tech reg-tech and tech-tech; A rounds and B rounds and down rounds, LPs and floats and phoenixes until finally returning to green tape red so the song cycle could begin again.
…
But it occurred to Anna as she leant further in, smiling, sagging on her crutch, that no one dared say they were frightened or, unlike Lisa Shahn, risk describing what they loved, they were unable to say that something struck them as beautiful, far less confess that they no longer knew how to talk with their children or their parents and perhaps never had, that they were lost, or alone."

But Flanagan’s descriptions of visiting a stricken relative in hospital will be pertinent to anyone who has experienced that process:

"The Hobart hospital corridors gradually became as familiar to her as the street on which she lived—the neon-lit tunnels along which she made her way through the befuddled odours of disinfectant and death, past cleaning trolleys with their chipped enamelled metal rings dangling bright burnt orange plastic bags, the shark-mouthed sharps boxes, hand-sanitising stations, silent gurneys and gossipy ward stations, amidst a clustering chaos of signs signalling to Anna only her own growing confusion."

And it is pleasing to see later-life care, one of our society’s biggest problems, tackled in a novel – I’m struggling to think of many precedents other than Margaret Drabble’s excellent The Dark Flood Rises, albeit in Flanagan’s novel this theme gets rather lost under his polemical and the myriad of other themes.

Stylistically, the novel seems designed to replicate our attention-deficient social-media age, with some jarringly unpunctuated passages that interrupt the novel’s more natural flow.

"She looked at her phone she checked Instagram she read professors of health were calling for cities to be readied for mass evacuation Indigenous people fearing central Australia is becoming too hot for humans towns running out of water Australia ending its hottest year ever while someone was saying that it wasn’t, that official weather records had been forged to make Australia look colder in the past and hotter now. It wasn’t that these things were fragments, thought Anna. The world was fragments. She liked a meme she reposted she followed she no longer knew if the fires were already over even though they hadn’t really yet begun. Things that happened yesterday were things happening today and things that hadn’t happened tomorrow were old news several months ago. Was it only just yesterday was it the future now?"

Or half-listening to the doctors (with a nod I assume to Ulysses):

"She reposted a video she hadn’t watched on Rem Koolhaas interiors when Terzo said the family felt dialysis was a better option, Anna looked up and nodded, murmuring assent, while the specialists’ language became at once more direct and more opaque they spoke they said damaging dangerous they advised against not hospital policy, yes, Anna said, yes."

Or rather more randomly talking to her son:

"It was just a few dollars it was nothing of the sort, Anna said, Gus wouldn't and didn't it was depression the times toxic masculinity the housing market millennial despair screens solar spots and, in her darker moments, her possible failure as a mother."

Oddly Flanagan seems to employ this device randomly, to the extent that I at first wondered if the passages were a I was reading a poorly-formatted ARC rather than deliberate artistic intent.

Part of the novel also appears written in real-time a la Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, or Olivia Laing’s Crudo:

"She would scroll the country would burn she would watch a video shot by firefighters inside a fire truck swallowed by fire try to escape tunnelling through a phone screen of pure flame, flame moving like water giant rolling and breaking waves of fire, firefighters dead, a politician in board shorts holidaying in Hawaii, arms around people drinking tossing a shaka, hanging loose..

A reference to this story from December 2019, while Flanagan would have been writing the novel:
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/12/19/pm-hawaii-10-year-old-tears

and this photo:
https://1v1d1e1lmiki1lgcvx32p49h8fe-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1576747198-hold-my-beer-960x540.jpg

(Incidentally, the target of Flanagan’s ire in both the newspaper article and this part of the novel currently leads 57%-28% on preferred Prime Minister vs the opposition leader, and has a +34% net satisfaction rating)

We learn early on of the death if the fourth of the siblings by suicide as a teenager, and that transpires to be linked to yet another passing theme, the abuse of children in Marist Brothers schools.

And about two thirds of the way, rather randomly by the narrative device of a chance conversation with a neighbour on a plane (shades of Cusk?), he inserts a link to what had been intended 10 years ago to be an entire novel, an ambitious and doomed plan in WW2 to build a Jewish homeland in Tasmania.And one that then segues, but not neatly, into parrot into another ecological theme, the story of the orange-bellied parrot.

Oh and while this is all going on, Flanagan adds a magical realism element whereby body parts and eventually whole people start to disappear, although everyone seems (understandably) too distracted to notice.

So if Flanagan hasn’t achieved his original aim, he’s certainly achieved his end goal of incoherence.
A fascinating novel is a so-bad-its-almost-good way, and one that, were Flanagan eligible, would make this a strong Goldsmiths contender.

3.5 stars - rounded up to 4 because the author does appear to have achieved his original ambition, even if he pretends otherwise.

Francie is in hospital, coming to the end of a long life. Her three middle-aged children debate her care and medical treatment while trying to live their own busy lives against a backdrop of Australian bushfires and environmental distress. How should they balance Francie’s apparent wish for a peaceful death with their need to prolong her life as much as they can?

I thoroughly enjoyed this slim Tasmanian novel by Booker Prize winning writer Richard Flanagan. My enjoyment was a little surprising, considering the twin themes of death and environmental destruction, but the writing was so absorbing that the experience was thought-provoking rather than depressing. There were some shocking twists which I didn’t see coming, much like in real life, I particularly liked Anna’s semi-magical (maybe symbolic) slow disappearance as she rushed around trying to deal with everything happening at once.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

In a recent (September 28, 2020) Guardian interview around this book (for I assume the Australian part of the website, given the UK publication is not until January 2021) the author said “successful books are ones that have escaped the author’s intentions and become something else. Novels when they succeed are incoherent and contradictory and mysterious. Nothing is more secondary to a writer’s achievements than their original ambition”

And that I think is particularly appropriate for this book – given I think (and this is not mentioned in the interview) the book was first conceived around 10 years ago as a story of Critchley Parker, the son of a mining magnate who conceived a plan in 1941-2 to build a Jewish homeland in the south-west corner of Tasmania, only to die on a solo survey of the area.

That story is still in this novel – but very much as a 1 page aside related to the decline in the population of the now critically endangered orange-bellied parrot, but still stands as an important part of the book – as a testament (as Flanagan said in a January 2010 ABC interview – at which point he said he has been working for a year on a novel around the story) both to a beautiful but remote landscape and to the “great poetic beauty about [Parker’s] stoic and ultimately doomed quest”, a quest motivated by love (in Parker’s case for a Jewish journalist) and by a determination to dream big in the face of the seemingly implacable onset of evil.

The novel that Flanagan has written is still about this – but it is about so much more.

The ostensible plot of the book is relatively simple if imbued by a heavy dose of magic realism (which also I think owes something to Saramago). As an aside though between Flanagan and Robbie Arnott it feels like a new genre is emerging which owes less to other literature and more to the particular nature of the Tasmania that is home to both of them. A literature I described in my review of Arnott’s Flames as Tasmanian Flora and Fauna, Fantasy and Folklore, Fusion literature.

The ostensible plot is around a 87-year old Tasmanian lady (Francie) dying in hospital. Francie has three surviving children: Anna (the main point of view character of the novel), Tommy and Terzo. Her second child Ronnie committed suicide as a teenager. Anna and Terzo have both made successful careers away from the Island – Anna an architect, Terzo a venture capitalist – while Tommy stayed behind in Tasmania taking on the caring duties for his mother. Anna is divorced and has a reclusive son Gus who she forced into independence as young child while she built her career but who now, as an older teenager, spends most of his time in his room playing online computer games.

As Francie’s condition deteriorates, Tommy’s (and Francie’s) resigned acceptance of the removal of medical intervention, spurs Anna and Terzo into marshalling their influence, contacts and money into trying every possible medical route to prolong her existence, well past the point of any medical or even moral justification.

All of this takes place against 2020 Australia – racked by extremes of heat and terrible bushfires, and the deaths of animals and birds; as well as against a wider background of accelerating natural extinctions, refugee crises and the apparent indifference of government. The smoke from the bushfires directly impacts on Anna (“It was like living with a chronically sick smoker except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its foul and collapsed lungs”), but most of this more plays out on her Instagram and Twitter feeds (which she checks incessantly, partly as a way of avoiding her mother’s situation and the rightness of her own actions around it).

“Anna looked at her phone – a waterfall of faces that were not in her life, friends, workmates, celebrities, an ex-boyfriend …. all falling, so many meaningless droplets briefly lit before going dark before returning remarried, single, partnered, ever triumphal, while half of Greenland’s surface ice melted, France had its hottest day on record, a tiny Australian marsupial rat was the first species to e wiped out by climate change and the last Sumatran rhinoceros died”

The magic realism element though is that Anna realises (on the opening page of the novel) of vanishings – starting with the inexplicable loss of one of her fingers and then extending to her knee and other body parts – and then over time to the wider population. The missing parts are effectively pixelated like the “all too familiar photoshopped sheen”; but as well as the incongruity of them going missing, what bugs Anna the most is the apparent indifference of those around her to their disappearance; people (including Anna) quickly adapting to their invisibility.

Of course on the most direct level, this is a straight analogy for the apparent indifference of our society to the extinction of birds and animals (“It wasn’t much of a knee. But now it had vanished she realised she missed it. But like the aurochs it was gone. Like the thylacine and the Walkman. Like long sentences. Like smoke-free summers. Gone, never to return”)

But on another level this could also be (and is) about all of: the invisibility of middle-aged females to men; the way in which death has largely disappeared from society to take place in hospitals in the company of strangers – as well as being out off as long as possible, well beyond any measure of the quality of life; the way in which busy parents disappear from their families into their work; and how teenagers in turn disappear from their parents into their bedrooms – all themes among the many explored in the book (you can also for example add religious/school related sexual abuse).

Perhaps most symbolically of all, I see it as representing the way in which 21st century humans, precisely at the time when they most need to engage with the world and change its trajectory, have largely vanished from it and moved to the online world of clicks and likes.

“The more things changed the harder people stared into their screens, living elsewhere, the real worlds now no more than a simulacrum of the screen world, their real lives the shadow of their online lives. The more people vanished the more they asserted themselves online as if in some grotesque equation or transfer.”

Overall the message of the book is about hopeful engagement in the face of societal turmoil and environmental breakdown. But not social media engagement – instead engagement with the natural world (in all its damaged beauty) and with your immediate family (in all theirs).

“She wished to once more observe the world not as people said it was, but as it is. She wanted to be attentive to this is, not panicked by what wasn’t. She needed to precisely know the world as it presented itself to her. And if it revealed a bruised, damaged universe, still perhaps there would be in the very wound some hope.”

A fabulous book. While on the subject of disappearances, the year’s since Flanagan won the Booker Prize (for, I think, his most conventional novel) have seen an almost complete disappearance (one 2015 longlist sighting) of Antipodean authors (somewhat like the Red Squirrel it would seem following the introduction of less aesthetically pleasing US competition). I would like to think this “incoherent and contradictory and mysterious” but above all excellent, novel may start the reversal of that trend.