... intriguing ... Flanagan...turns climate change’s harsh realities into rivers of words, and also magical visions ... The result is a beguiling book that takes time to settle but is hard to forget. It feels at first like a dizzying collage ... But in the end, like Flanagan’s best work...the novel grounds itself in humane ideals. Love. Hope. Dignity. These values emerge as if they were part of the mystery, slowly, with clues that pile up behind a curtain of flames ... The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, like Jonathan Franzen’s best novels, quietly traces a societal rift around wealth and what amounts to a 'good life' ... The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is especially strong when its characters—and the reader—actually linger to lament what’s gone or going ...
If there is hope in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams...it may be found in that simple admonition. Look extinction in the face and find meaning in what we have left.
... [a] gorgeous, mesmerizing new novel ... So much is going on in this novel, yet Flanagan never misses a beat. His language is drum-tight, his ear for prose rhythms impeccable ... Death broods over this novel; the reader senses Flanagan’s eye on the clock, his preoccupation with his own mortality. And yet the mosaic of life endures—fitful, imperiled, but also joyous. Transformations are everywhere in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. Flanagan saves his most intriguing reveals for the later chapters ... Flanagan has given us a novel that’s inventive and lyrical, a dark meditation on where we are and where we may be headed. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is his finest work yet.
... combines the moral righteousness of a fable, the wounded grief of a eulogy, and the fury of someone who still reads the news. And smouldering underneath it all is the red memory of last summer’s reign of fire ... The Living Sea of Waking Dreams follows Anna as she battles her mother’s decline, insisting on last-ditch therapies in the way only those with power and money can. Are her actions a ferocious form of love, sublimated guilt, or a fearful evasion of love’s most intimate and painful obligations? Anna does not know. What she does know is there is an intoxicating calm – a kind of existential grace – to be found at her mother’s bedside ... at its best when it balances its vehemence with its beauty, when it leaves space for the reader to wander and wonder – eucalypt leaves swinging down like 'lazing scimitars'; a moth thrumming its 'Persian rug' wings. Flanagan’s novel may be brutal, but unlike Terzo and Anna – so ferociously determined 'to save their mother from her own wishes' – it is not wilfully cruel.
... kaleidoscopic ... it is a book that aspires, as well, to the ineffable ... It’s tempting, in the face of all this desolation, to see Francie’s suffering as a metaphor for the limits of technology, which are the limits of imagination, or perhaps of our willingness to engage the hard reality of death. But that’s too narrow a reading of this provocative and disturbing book ... For Flanagan, it is this loss—of touch, of contact—that is the tragedy, the way technology abstracts us, renders us objects, or problems to be solved.
This tale of family drama takes a surreal turn when one of Anna’s fingers disappears suddenly, 'without accident or pain'. She is an early victim of a strange epidemic of 'vanishings', whereby people fade from view, body part by body part. This conceit functions as a somewhat gloopy metaphor for the novel’s interlinked themes: the decline of empathy, the spectre of climate change and the inevitable passing of all things ... Laments for threatened species — platypuses, rainbow lorikeets — are pointedly juxtaposed with reflections on estranged relationships, implying a connection between our moral and ecological crises ... Flanagan writes movingly about environmental destruction, but his mawkishness grates ... Facile hand-wringing about the internet is the literary navel-gazing trope of our age; hopefully, in time, it will go the way of the aurochs and the Walkman.
Only a window separates the two worlds of Richard Flanagan’s new novel: a world of human control, in which every act is a kind of triumph over nature; and the world outside, where apparently limitless life is being steadily reduced to cinders. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a meditation on the fragility of this window, the wilful denial of our connection to nature, and the inexorable pull of 'a place of quiet and green, of reverie, perhaps transcendence' ... The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is strewn with arresting images and turns of phrase; it is a powerful story about 'so many sacred worlds' now 'vanished into a sooty smear'. But at times it feels like the narrative itself is guilty of the same cursory scrolling that it deplores ... But the author’s less-is-more approach to these strands ends up feeling like a disservice to the people in them – and a symptom, perhaps, of a wider loss of faith in the power of literature itself.
t’s certainly ambitious, powerful in its descriptions of drought, bush fires, impending environmental disaster; to this extent certainly a novel for our troubled times. It is also an uneasy hybrid, the private and public themes crudely yoked together, the private domestic part of the novel disfigured by tiresome and rather pointless dashes of magic realism ... Credibility collapses when the magic realism moves in. Anna finds bits falling off her body: first a finger, then a knee. Nobody notices or pays attention. Later bits will fall off her lover Meg. No doubt this reflects or is intended to reflect both Francie’s deterioration and the climate crisis. But since, unlike them, it seems incredible and silly, it weakens the novel. It’s mere fantasy and realism is almost always more interesting than whimsy of this sort ... It’s a pity because other parts of the novel are very good.
Flanagan gets close to something good here, a wicked take on end-of-life care, economic privilege and hubris in the face of death. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams can even be viewed as a decent allegory on the climate crisis ... If only Flanagan weren’t so obvious about it all. No point in this book is too plain that it can’t be blasted with a spotlight ... Anna thinks...'Gone, never to return.' Like a reader’s patience ... What irritates most about Flanagan’s novel is that Anna is more a character than a person. She’s hard to take and harder to believe.
... superb ... palliative not in the least and any 'hope' it offers is an inclusive but spiritually explosive one. It is a remarkable book and it serves Literature in the most insistent, dedicated, and demanding manner ... Any novelist writing at this moment should write in such a way that no reader can remain indifferent or feign ignorance or innocence of our role in the subjugation of the world, our brutal and heedless subtraction of her wonders, the fact that plastic and ash will be our legacy. The Novel, the most sociable of the arts, must no longer tread the same familiar arid anthropocentric paths ... There is an ending before the ending here. It is extravagant, savagely memorable ... Flanagan’s novel is brave enough to say It’s not about us any more. It really isn’t.
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 ... The brilliance of Flanagan’s story and the deep power of this novel is in our witnessing of the end of the world. The death of Francie opens up a black hole in the family drawing Anna, Terzo and Tommy into its implacable singularity.
... peculiar and bewitching ... Flanagan tells his story with a dreamy and fluid, almost rambling style that exposes a nightmare of responses to traumas both natural and expected, and those inflicted through willful harm and ignorance ... Anna and Terzo’s treatment of Francie and Tommy, whose stutter—and not his compassion, patience, competence and loyalty—is the lens through which the siblings see him, is cringe-inducing, and Flanagan wisely holds back much of the family dynamic and history. Readers are dropped down into a smoldering landscape, thick with smoke obscuring vision and easy interpretation. Cautionary and strange, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a powerful rumination on frailty and mortality.
Written with Flanagan’s characteristic mix of humanism and emotional insight, this uneven novel could have been powerful and moving. Its artistic problem is that layered into it is Anna’s conviction that she herself is vanishing, losing first a finger, then a knee in an extended metaphor that, true to the tropes of magic realism, drives inexorably towards parrots: specifically, orange-bellied ones that are disappearing in Tasmania, thanks to the destruction of their habitat. Anna waits for people to notice that she is disappearing. They don’t, although it is a condition that is catching: her son Gus, obsessed by gaming, vanishes to the extent that only a pair of thumbs pressing buttons on his console are left, raising a rare smile in those of us familiar with this problem too ... Flanagan’s gift is not, however, for Kafkaesque fantasy; what could have made two very different novellas is mashed into one 282-page novel.
There are really two novels here. The first is a carefully observed account of an everyday family tragedy... Running parallel to this story is a magical realist fantasia about bodily vanishings. First Anna’s fingers go, then other of her appendages. Her friends start losing parts of their bodies, too. These moments of loss are described with dreamlike ambiguity ... Flanagan’s writing suffers from a similar kind of haziness, with sentences, which on first glance look as though they’re doing precise descriptive work, falling apart under closer scrutiny ... The problem with The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is that it is all vehicle and no tenor. Flanagan’s central metaphor is a flabby one: neither specific enough to do much explanatory work, nor ambiguous enough to sustain much intrigue.
The analogy between the life-support system used to sustain Francie and the current economic system perpetuating environmentally destructive industries may be obvious, and Flanagan’s point is not subtle. Unless radical changes are made, we face a bleak, unimaginable world in the near future. Like Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), this is a timely, unforgettable work of climate fiction, unrelenting in its focus on the horrors of climate change, but one that also offers some hope.
... I found myself thinking there are so many potential books inside The Living Sea of Waking Dreams that I wish Richard Flanagan had written. Instead, we have the one he chose to write, which I feel does not achieve his desired outcome ... The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, with its pervasive sense of slowly unfolding doom, is a book about vanishing — not just figuratively and literally, but also in an oddly liminal space between the two ... The author is urgent in his desire to get his readers to grasp — to notice — the climate catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes, if only our eyes weren’t glued to our phones. That urgency translates into an unsubtle, hectoring repetitiveness that undermines his message ... Even if he’s preaching to the converted, though, this is not the book to shake readers into looking up from their screens.
Flanagan shines in his fierce, surrealistic look at a family’s dissolution in a recognizable if dystopian Australia that’s ravaged by wildfires ... Juxtaposing measured prose with passages that jolt and tumble, and realistic depictions of medical issues with Francie’s phantasmagoric visions, Flanagan’s novel illuminates the dangers of taking the world and one another for granted. Its intensity, urgency, and insights are unforgettable.
... though Flanagan is justified in his outrage—the natural world is literally disappearing in front of our glazed eyes—he fails to embed his outrage in a convincingly articulated story. With every scene, every character, and every sentence deployed in unabashed support of the book’s themes, the novel lacks the narrative verisimilitude it needs to transcend the realm of polemic—a problem exacerbated by Flanagan’s summary-heavy style, his refusal to explore any setting, person, or idea with adequate depth or complexity. The disappearance of Anna’s body parts, for instance, is barely integrated into the story: She is rarely debilitated by her missing limbs, and the entire phenomenon reads like an overearnest symbol, an errant plot arc that the author, grasping for Gogol-ian profundity, pasted in and forgot to flesh out. Heartfelt though his work is, beautiful though his sentences are, Flanagan has given us an early draft—a fleshy sketch of a denser, better book ... A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.
