The Living Sea of Waking Dreams - SCWC Book reviewer in residence
REVIEWED BY ANDY MUIR
Raw and challenging, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is hard to describe. But the enigmatic title offers a hint.
One of Australia’s most celebrated and critically acclaimed novelists Richard Flanagan writes with his heart on his sleeve. This novel is no different, telling the story of a family coming to terms with a dying mother, the changing climate and a bushfire apocalypse. The main protagonist is Anna, the eldest daughter of three siblings not yet ready to accept their elderly mother’s approaching death. Battling her mother’s failing body, her siblings and her own emotions, Anna refuses to allow her mother to simply die. Raging against this inevitability, Anna discovers one day that her knee has disappeared. And no one else seems to notice. Then a finger also disappears.
An allegory, the novel explores notions of mortality for both the individual and our species. The author writes with raging fury at humanity refusing to accept and act on saving the planet, preferring to anaesthetise ourselves with doom scrolling our news feeds and watching cat videos. And the work is at times almost polemic in its attacks, which is where Flanagan demonstrates his incredible writing skill, cutting through the anger with lines of poignant beauty. Anyone who has seen an elderly loved one fade away will recognise and empathise with Flanagan’s descriptions. Anna describing her mother’s parchment-like skin and a loving memory about Oil of Ulan moisturiser is incredibly striking. My copy of the work has multiple pages marked, highlighting a sentence or paragraph for the ideas and the structure. Not so much the disappearing body parts.
On my first reading, the disappearing body parts were confusing. What did they mean? Worse, as a reader, every time they were used, I was unfortunately whipped out of the text, trying to visualise and conceptualise what a knee-less leg would look like, a hand disappearing into blurriness without fingers, or a loved one being reduced to a Cheshire Cat mouth and a computer playing thumb. By the end of the novel, there is no explanation for why these things happen. Then you remember the title and these magic realism elements become something else. It is perfectly normal in a dream landscape for people to disappear and reappear, where surreal things happen as our unconsciousness tries to form meanings and understanding. This reveals that I am a writer and a reader who reads for the ending not so much the journey; at the end of a work I want to understand the riddles, not stew in more questions.
Yet, the novel is beautiful and wide open to interpretation. It confidently pushes form and content, challenging the reader to dig deeper. This makes it perfect for book groups and conversations with other readers. The discussion will be worth it. And like climate change, there are no easy solutions.
Thank you to Penguin for the review copy of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan. You can grab your own copy from Booktopia here.
SCWC 2021 Book Reviewer: Andy Muir
Award nominated screenwriter and story researcher for the hugely successful Underbelly franchise, Andy Muir was nominated for a Ned Kelly for his debut crime fiction Something for Nothing (Affirm Press, 2017). The follow up Hiding to Nothing (Affirm Press, 2019) continues anti hero Lachie Munro’s misadventures. Awarded a 2019 Australian Society of Authors Fellowship, he is currently writing two new crime novels.