'In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight.
'When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope and love and orange-bellied parrots.
'An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving—and astonishing—best.' (Publication summary)
Dedication :
For David and Diane
Masters
–lighthouse keepers–
Epigraph:
'To the axe of the spoiler and self-interest fell a prey;
And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak's narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits, I shall never see again:
Inclosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain,
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors—though the brook is running still,
It runs a naked brook, cold and chill.'
- John Clare, Remembrances
A brief review of this work appeared in The New York Times June 6, 2021
'This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.' (Publication abstract)
'Within the first few pages of Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, one encounters a raft of losses. The book, which centres around three siblings, Anna, Tommy and Terzo, and their mother Francie, opens with the vanishing of Anna’s middle finger; Tommy recounts the loss of ladybirds, soldier beetles, bluebottles, earwigs, Christmas beetles, flying ant swarms, frogs and cicadas and their songs, emperor gum moths, Persian rug wings, quolls, potoroos, pardalotes, swift parrots, great kelp forests, abalone, and crayfish; and it becomes known that there is a fourth sibling, Ronnie, who died in his teens.' (Introduction)
'There is a telling moment in Life After Death, the 2015 BBC documentary about Richard Flanagan. All the Tasmanian writer’s novels are addressed chronologically during the film. Flanagan is prompted in each instance to explain the genesis of a work: the real-life inspiration, or those biographical or historical facts on which a particular fiction is based. All of which, dutifully and fluently, he does.' (Introduction)
'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel, is one of a slew of novels one expects to emerge from the shadow of the 2019–2020 bushfire season that darkened the skies of eastern Australia for weeks on end, scorching forests from Byron Bay to Kangaroo Island.' (Introduction)
'In this magical realist tale, Flanagan’s extinction metaphor is not subtle – but the fiction of the Anthropocene can’t afford to be.'
'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams begins, self-consciously, at the limits of language. Its opening pages are rendered in a prose style that is fragmented and contorted. Sentences break down, run into each other. Syntax is twisted into odd shapes that call into question the very possibility of meaning. Words seem to arrive pre-estranged by semantic satiation in a way that evokes Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett at their most opaque: ‘As if they too were already then falling apart, so much ash and soot soon to fall, so much smoke to suck down. As if all that can be said is we say you and if that then. Them us were we you?’' (Introduction)
'Novelist Richard Flanagan talks about the themes in his new book – grief and loss, but also possibility, and the beauty of a disappearing world'
At Home with Richard Flanagan
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2020
23453046
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Richard Flanagan is one of Australia's most beloved novelists. He is also Australia's most recent recipient of The Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In this interview, he discusses his latest work, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.
'We recorded this interview remotely and Richard was at his home in Tasmania.'(Production introduction)
'This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.' (Publication abstract)
