Mollified by social media (“blessed Novocaine of the soul”) and peak TV (“bedtime fairy-tales for adults”), his disappearing populace resign themselves to fading away. Dying can be an undignified business, but it is apathy that Flanagan finds grotesque. Francie’s decline is rendered as a slow motion horror, but she is never the monster. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams 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.įlanagan’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. Tomorrow was terrifying, if we made it that far.” Flanagan’s extinction metaphor is not subtle, but the fiction of the Anthropocene can not afford to be gentle summer is coming. But then another body part follows, and another.Īustralian readers raised on Mem Fox will catch a sinister echo of Possum Magic here – that childhood tale of a fading daughter. “The only surprise to her was how little she felt about feeling so little.” She is a middle-aged woman, after all, and inured to social invisibility. When she realises that one of her own fingers has disappeared – a painless victim to some mystical “silent leprosy” – Anna is oddly unflustered. At home in Sydney, Anna’s possessions are vanishing, too – hocked, she thinks, by her sullen, cash-strapped son. Doom-scrolling on social media, she finds “perverse comfort” in watching the sixth extinction wreak its obliterative carnage – a kind of grim companionship.Ī vanishing world a vanishing mother.

“It was like living with a chronically sick smoker,” Flanagan writes, “except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its fouled and collapsing lungs.” It’s a desolation so immense that it’s possible for Anna to lose her own pain inside it. The reef is bleaching and the bees are dying and the sky is black with pyro-cumulus terror.

Outside the air-con cool of the hospital, Australia is burning. ‘Flanagan’s novel may be brutal, but it is not wilfully cruel.’ Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

The sea of waking dreams