Francie was talking to Anna about the plain of fires beyond the window when Terzo arrived. Almost immediately he was irritated and began arguing with Francie, telling her that her dreams were not to be taken seriously, that they were vile delusions brought on by her meds, and that she should stop talking about them as if they were the truth. It wasn’t enough for Terzo that their mother had not died. It wasn’t enough that she lived in her sea of waking dreams. In Terzo’s view, she had to live like us, rationally, in a rational universe. And as there was to be no death, nor could there be any other life.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams has so much going on in it — sibling drama, end of life care, climate change, Millennial ennui, the sinkhole of social media, sexual abuse, suicide, sexism, classism, and an interrogation into what makes for a well-lived life — and I wanted to love this when I was just a few issues deep, but ultimately, Richard Flanagan just threw too much against the wall for me; and although I think that in subject and format Flanagan captures something true and compelling about modern life, I ended up feeling more overwhelmed than connected. This could win awards but failed to move me; three and a half stars, rounded up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The smoke had turned the air a tobacco brown, the blinding brilliance of the island’s blue skies glimpsed only when the winds blew a small hole in the pall that sat over much of the island. The smoke never seemed to lift and on the worst days reduced everyone’s horizon to a few hundred yards and enclosed the world in a way that felt claustrophobic. The sun stumbled into each day a guilty party, a violent red ball, indistinct in outline, shuddering through the haze as if hungover, while in the ochry light smoke smothered every street and the smoke filled every room, the smoke sullied every drink and every meal; the acrid, tarry, sulphurous smoke that burnt the back of every throat and filled every mouth and nose blocking out the warm gentle smells of summer. It was like living with a chronically sick smoker except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its fouled and collapsing lungs.
Set in Tasmania and Australia during last year's uncontrolled wildfires, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is told from the POV of Anna; a successful architect who escaped her family’s humble beginnings for life in Sydney, but who is called home to Hobart when her aging mother is hospitalised. Anna and her younger brother Terzo (a wealthy venture capitalist) routinely bully their older brother Tommy (a stuttering, unambitious artist who stayed close to home to take care of their mother, Francie), and when Francie’s condition turns from bad to worse, Anna and Terzo decide to take over control of her care, advocating for a painful prolongation against their mother’s wishes and Tommy’s better judgement. Everything about this storyline was dramatic and relatable — from the sibling dynamics and their family history, to Anna’s ambivalent guilt, to how flying back and forth between Sydney and Hobart affects Anna’s career and her relationships with her romantic partner and her bedroom-dwelling, video-gaming adult son — and I would have liked it better if the book had focussed more narrowly on this. But in addition to frequent asides about the fires and the melting ice caps and the disappearing species, Anna deals with stress by scrolling through Twitter and Instagram (often flitting between sites and photos on her phone in a Joycean, digital stream-of-consciousness), and overlaid over all of that, is some strange surrealism, with people’s body parts disappearing without distress or general acknowledgement:
For so long they had been searching, liking, friending and commenting, emojiing and cancelling, unfriending and swiping and scrolling again, thinking they were no more than writing and rewriting their own worlds, while, all the time — sensation by sensation, emotion by emotion, thought by thought, fear on fear, untruth on untruth, feeling by feeling — they were themselves being slowly rewritten into a wholly new kind of human being. How could they have known that they were being erased from the beginning?
This is technically well-written and a fitting commentary on our times — which is why I’m rounding up instead of down — but the whole thing left me a bit cold. This has plenty of five star reviews, so your experience may well be more positive.
