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A review by clara_wiecks_no_1_fan
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
5.0
I’ve never really been one to read newly released books, it usually takes me 18-24 months after publication before I end up getting to anything, as the pile of books on my bedside table gets growing pains and almost a topples, I’m glad this is the book that I decided to devour in one sitting, rather than to read ten pages for today and put down indefinitely.
Flanagan’s elegant prose captures the atmosphere of the Australian summer of 2019-2020 to the minutiae. The Antipodean experience of the oppressive heat of summer, heightened by the carelessness of the government to the climate crisis, as well as bushfires, and mass extinction — large stories — are woven through the tapestry of a family who, too, are in crisis.
Flanagan faces some of the most controversial topics in contemporary media, discussing historic sex abuse in the Catholic Church, the ethics of euthanasia (and conversely the ethics of prolonging life past the point of truly living), the struggle of raising children in a world that has chasmic generational divides, and the paralytic power of social media as both vice and pacifier when we are at our most fragile. The book covers a lot, and yet, it does not feel as if Flanagan attempted to squeeze too many buzzwords, the story is not bloated with a salience of culture.
Under the oppressive blanket of the pyrocumulonimbus, and the oppressive weight of the grief of a half life which longs for but is denied death, this reckoning with modernity also reads as a Cassandra story. Yet unlike Cassandra, the people around her see and believe what Anna says, and it is all the more frustrating that they choose to not care, preferring to to look back at the blurred perfection of Instagram.
This is not the book for those wanting to escape the year we’ve had. But it is a book that perfectly captures the individual and collective experience of the grief that has been shared.
Flanagan’s elegant prose captures the atmosphere of the Australian summer of 2019-2020 to the minutiae. The Antipodean experience of the oppressive heat of summer, heightened by the carelessness of the government to the climate crisis, as well as bushfires, and mass extinction — large stories — are woven through the tapestry of a family who, too, are in crisis.
Flanagan faces some of the most controversial topics in contemporary media, discussing historic sex abuse in the Catholic Church, the ethics of euthanasia (and conversely the ethics of prolonging life past the point of truly living), the struggle of raising children in a world that has chasmic generational divides, and the paralytic power of social media as both vice and pacifier when we are at our most fragile. The book covers a lot, and yet, it does not feel as if Flanagan attempted to squeeze too many buzzwords, the story is not bloated with a salience of culture.
Under the oppressive blanket of the pyrocumulonimbus, and the oppressive weight of the grief of a half life which longs for but is denied death, this reckoning with modernity also reads as a Cassandra story. Yet unlike Cassandra, the people around her see and believe what Anna says, and it is all the more frustrating that they choose to not care, preferring to to look back at the blurred perfection of Instagram.
This is not the book for those wanting to escape the year we’ve had. But it is a book that perfectly captures the individual and collective experience of the grief that has been shared.