The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

What a flight! What a living sea of waking dreams, of nightmares. Australian writer Flanagan is suis generis, and unassuming, and the narrative so full of the vulnerable that I couldn’t help but weep. The story concerns Anna, her mother, Francie, her brothers Tommy and Terzo, and their dead brother, Ronnie. It takes place primarily in Tasmania, same as Gould’s Book of Fish.The time is now, but yet is speculative. Inside, Francie is dying, but outside, species are vanishing, the island is aflame, Tasmania is on fire, the smoke everywhere, obscuring everything. Inside, Anna notices a missing finger, also a vanishing. Outside, the noise—the construction is noisy, news is noisy, Instagram and Facebook are screaming. Fog, heavy fog is all around them. Anna looks down at her phone and up at her mother.This family is heartbreaking, the various tragedies powerful and weighty. And now, as their elderly mother lay dying, they refuse to allow nature to take its course. I was a hospice nurse for several years, so I get it. But you don’t have to be a hospice worker to comprehend the misuse of medicine here. Out of shame, guilt, irony, and fear, the family insists on extending her life via modern technology/medicine, instead, they are extending her death. A living corpse. Francie is vanishing, birds are vanishing, snakes, trees—but the phones and social media are very much at hand. Time is burning.“Everything seemed to be in danger of slipping away once inside; time went too quickly…days passing in hours, or time did not move at all, and seconds took decades to pass…plastic gurneys, strangers in scrubs, patient monitors, ventilators, defibrillators, ECG machines, anaesthesia machines…beeping machinery…as if the entire system existed not to keep the patients going, but, rather, the patients existed to keep the system going.”The novel is about more than Francie dying/not dying. Francie’s condition on the pages is like a valve that opens or a dam that bursts and a vehicle for the reader to peer further inside the paradoxes and sadness of this family and the state of the planet, without platitudes or judgment by the author. The author stands back, doesn’t interfere, although it is his construct and architecture of voice and narrative that shatters and indwells the reader into this epochal, earth-shaking story.Flanagan is a master of language, cadence. Periodically, no periods. Unpunctually, no colons commas semicolons. The clarity comes from the spaces separating words. The very opacity enumerates specificity. I often read it out loud, to hear it more effectively, like dialogue in a play. The ambiguous and outwardly toneless, flat, or obscure sentences are in fact some of the most distinct, nuanced, and specific. If you locate the author’s intended emphasis, you’ll perceive its precision and theatrical, poetic grace. You can’t rush in with your own presumptive cadence.Of the sentences not punctuated, let go, and you arrive where he intends for you to pause, to stop, to exclaim, to flutter up or tone it down. What to do with the spaces between words? To remove the space, so to speak? To emphasize it? To soften it, shout, pause, or stop? It’s part of the tone and voice, and a phenomenon of the story. Follow Flanagan’s lead, not your own. You’ll read it best when you’re vulnerable.Beginnings, endings, life, death, climate change, extinction, love, loss—if this sounds too broad, in Flanagan’s hands it is masterful and assiduous, and most of all, emotionally compelling. It is sure to be my #1 book of the year.