The burden of guilt: The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan, reviewed

Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard of. His reworking of the life of the Australian hero ‘Weary’ Dunlop, a doctor who became a prisoner of war on the notorious Burma Death Railway, in The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a winner of a traditional kind of literary storyteller that has recently become extinct. It seems appropriate that his eighth novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, is also about extinction, both personal and environmental.

Tasmania is burning, and as its cornucopia of flora and fauna is wiped out, three children gather to decide whether to let their exhausted 86-year-old mother Francie die, or demand intervention by modern medicine. Anna and her brother Terzo, who are successful professionals living in Australia, initially want to let her go, but Tommy, who has been their mother’s main carer, does not. In the course of the novel, they swap positions. Already bereaved, they carry a burden of guilt that will be familiar to many.

Francie’s ‘enforced selflessness’ as wife and mother has, Anna believes, cost her ‘a terrible price in terms of a professional life, a public life, a private life realising her full possibilities’. Her ‘waking dreams’ of the past are vivid, even when cut off from the beauty of the natural world she loves, and are an embarrassment to her more sophisticated children.

The only member of her family to give Francie genuine love and compassion is Tommy, her stammering, chaotic, emotionally damaged son. He is powerless to protest effectively, but the fear of being thought ‘a bad person’ makes Anna and Terzo insist that their mother be kept artificially alive.