Novelist Richard Flanagan talks about the themes in his new book – grief and loss, but also possibility, and the beauty of a disappearing world
About half an hour into our conversation, I ask Richard Flanagan what gives him hope. There’s a pause down the phone line, the hiss of empty, mechanical air. Gaps and silences are not unusual in a phone call with Australia’s most recent Booker Prize winner. Not because he’s lost for words – that’s not his style – but because Flanagan is a deeply thoughtful, deeply considered conversationalist. His words are precise, carefully chosen, carrying import and meaning.
To be clear, his magnificent new book The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is hopeful. It is bleak at times, a book about a disappearing world, about loss and grief, about familial failures of empathy and societal failures of attention. But it is also playful; with an eye for absurdity and a darkly funny streak. It is a novel that unmistakably has been written against the backdrop of Australia’s rapidly dying, rapidly vanishing, rapidly degraded natural world. And yet it is, at its heart, hopeful. It’s quite the trick.
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