I’m old enough now to have sat beside two dying parents- and who knows if life holds further deathbed vigils for me- and one of the things that struck me even in the midst of it was what a strange time it was. Outside that room, life teemed on oblivious; inside that room, each breath was watched and counted. This strangeness pervades Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, starting right from the opening pages. It’s summer, and the city is shrouded in smoke, just as we remembered January 2020 to be (although I had forgotten that smoke when we were then catapaulted into COVID lockdowns by March that year). Anna looks down at her hand, and notices that her ring-finger is missing, blurred out, gone. Her mother is in hospital after a “bad turn” following the dreaded “fall”, having five years earlier been diagnosed and treated for hydrocephalus, and then diagnosed with low-grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now she has had a cerebral hemorrhage, which will be followed by liver problems, and the family is asked what their mother’s wishes were.
Not that the siblings – Anna, Tommy and Terzo- are going to respect them, even when their mother Francie, painstakingly spells out ‘GOMELET’ on an alphabet board. “Let me go?” asks Anna, feigning astonishment, “But where are you going to go to?” Because, led by the forceful Terzo, the family has decided that their mother Francie must live, irrespective of cost, irrespective of doctors’ opinions. Strings are pulled, favours are called in, and Francie, becoming increasingly less human by the day, is kept alive by machines, because we can.
Meanwhile, those disappearances… first Anna’s finger, then her knee, then her breast, then parts of her face. No-one else seems to notice. Then her son, the unresponsive gamer locking himself in his bedroom and stealing from his mother, starts disappearing as well.
And at a broader level, there are disappearances too.
The ladybirds gone soldier beetles blue bottles gone earwigs you never saw now gone beautifully coloured Christmas beetles whose gaudy metallic shells they collected as kids gone flying ant swarms gone frog call in spring cicada drone in summer gone gone.
Gradually we learn the history of this family, and come to understand the dynamics between the adult children, starkly drawn in all its steely aggression and wilful blindness. This is a painfully honest book at the human level, and a grimly pessimistic book at the broader environmental level. It juxtaposes the desire to hold on at all costs to some lives and the blithe dispensing of others, power and powerlessness. It is a little heavy handed with the politics – I felt rather bashed over the head by it- but I was won over by his skill in interweaving his up-close personal story with a broader world-level story. Some readers will bridle against the magic realism, but for me it just highlighted the paradox of his argument. In many ways, this book touched on nearly all his previous books – the magic realism of Gould’s Book of Fish, the love for wilderness of Death of a River Guide and the horror of genocide and disappearance in Wanting. He is such an assured, deft writer.
Excellent.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: CAE bookgroups for my Ladies Who Say Oooh bookgroup. It was my choice.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 