The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Serious writers have a way of getting under your skin, and like Don Delillo’s Zero K, this novel takes a hard look at the way things are and doesn’t let the reader off the hook for a moment. If the satirical fable of Zero K centres on sleep as the answer to the woes of the world, Flanagan makes disappearance – of species, of body, of meaning – the heart of his message.  

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams has a simple plot, one immediately relatable: three adult siblings gather around their dying mother and struggle to let her go. The protagonist, Anna, should hold the sensible middle ground once treatments to prolong Francie’s life become inhumane, but she is under the spell of the Terzo, a wealth manager who believes that money and influence can buy life. Anna’s other brother, Tommy, is a sympathetically drawn character -- a struggling artist, stuttering and sentimental. A dead fourth sibling casts a dark shadow: Ronnie, a teenage suicide, likely the result of his interactions with a paedophile priest.

The realism of the text sits alongside the fable element of disappearance, or vanishing. At first Anna notices that her index finger inexplicably goes missing, with no sign of injury. Later, she loses a knee – though she can still perform a squat and a high kick. Now Flanagan draws together the personal loss with the wider one (we are in the middle of the 2019 bush fires, where billions of Australian animals are wiped out):

‘… It wasn’t much of a knee. But now that 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’ (p.79)

In my ignorance I had to google ‘aurochs’ (an extinct European ox) but Anna’s compulsive reading of her phone is a device Flanagan uses to convey bad news about the climate (‘… towns running out of water Australia ending its hottest year ever while someone was saying that it wasn’t ...’ [p.87]) and this has immediate resonance. Flanagan moves easily between the poetic and acerbic, as in the description of ‘a phone screen of pure flame, flame moving like a water giant rolling and breaking waves of fire’ and our collective memory of a certain politician ‘in board shorts holidaying in Hawaii, arms around people drinking tossing a shaka, hanging loose’ (p.98).

As the novel continues, more parts of Anna vanish. Gradually she notices missing parts on other bodies – while everyone ignores this uncomfortable news. In a satirical vein, this is partly because no one looks up from their phones (p.224); it is also simply avoidance – as Anna notes, ‘… the more the essential world vanished the more people needed to fixate on the inessential world’ (p.233). Talk about ‘another adult son reduced to a hand’ (as the rest of him vanishes) is described by Anna’s partner Meg as a ‘buzz killer’: ‘from the moment [Anna] mentioned a vanished nose or ear lobe, other people would start talking about politics or Netflix or TikTok’ (p.232). Anna’s own son is reduced to three fingers and a thumb controlling a gaming console, and her horror cannot even be expressed – a void emerges ‘into which she was terrified she now might disappear’ (p.249). And disappear she shortly does, as Flanagan shows the reader how expendable characters are (and by implication, the human species). Finally, though he does use some longer sentences, Flanagan doesn’t risk the verbosity of modernism to convey his apocalyptic message: ‘Words were collapsing, their job of conveying meaning meaningless in the face of all that was happening’ (p.274).

In writing these paragraphs I have probably said too much (as a review) but as I am posting online to a blog via social media, I doubt many will read these words beyond perhaps gaining the gist of a novel about vanishing. We have all felt uncertainty and anxiety as we think about the world around us collapsing sooner than we had ever imagined, and wondered about what to post, and how to avoid being the 'buzz killer' at the virtual party. Thankfully we have writers like Richard Flanagan who are braver than most, and can write sentences like ‘soon only wet gravel would remain’ to keep us reading and pondering the future, and what we might do about it.  

(See also First Person, The Unknown Terrorist, The Narrow Road to the Deep North).