Fiction

THE LIVING SEA OF WAKING DREAMS

By Richard Flanagan

Chatto & Windus/ Paperback/ 285 pages/ $27.95/ Available here

4 out of 5

Anna's world is falling apart. Once a successful architect, she finds herself spiralling both physically and emotionally as her mother dies slowly and the whole of Australia seems to catch fire.

While the trauma of both these events threatens to consume her, something even more disturbing is happening, seemingly unnoticed by everybody else.

Starting with just a finger, then a knee, Anna's body begins to vanish.

Australian author Flanagan, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for his World War II novel The Narrow Road To The Deep North, turns towards magical realism here.

He uses the device of Anna's vanishing to depict the world as he sees it - increasingly isolated and at the brink of ecological collapse.

In the face of such personal and existential pressure, Anna's body and self are erased.

Part of this erasure is due to the novel's characters seeking refuge in the virtual world. They are constantly absorbed by the Internet, gaming or scrolling through social media to distract themselves from the crisis that surrounds them.

Flanagan depicts bonds breaking down even as Anna's family are forced to converge around her dying mother.

This lacks nuance. His social critique can come across as heavy-handed, and adds little to the conversation about how social media strains ties.

Where he shines, however, is in setting the scene.

A sense of burning, reflective of the uncontrollable wildfires which seemed to rip endlessly through Australia in the last two years, forms a suffocating backdrop to the novel.

It pervades every scene, creating a montage effect of climate destruction. In a turn evocative of the Renaissance poet John Milton, Flanagan makes burning smog both beautiful and terrifying - a portrait given depth by his long-standing climate activism.

Despite the beauty of its prose and the poignant relevance of its message, the novel fails to satisfyingly marry the forces of magic realism and climate catastrophe.

The plot is at times opaque, and the characters seem almost porous, blending into one another in a way that is aesthetically pleasing but difficult to follow.

Still, this experiment in formulating a new language to describe the existential threat of climate change is powerful enough to draw a reader in.

If you like this, read: Weather by Jenny Offill (Granta, 2020, $18.95, available here). A librarian hired by a famous podcaster is thrust into a politically polarised online world, where she must answer to those on both sides of the debate about the climate and the decline of Western civilisation.