The author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North returns with a novel about Anna and her aged mother, who is dying while subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions. The hospital window provides a respite, allowing Anna's mother—and eventually Anna herself—to disappear into visions of horror and delight.
... 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.
