![]() ![]() Her body is rattling to a close, and her mind with it. ![]() ![]() The main arc of the story is that of a slow dying: Francie is in a Tasmanian hospital, bedbound, suffering a series of strokes and infections, hydrocephaly, dementia, kidney failures, you name it. It’s a threnody to a world in which our connections to nature, beauty and the human values of a less mediated past are being steadily chewed up by the march of monetised technology. Which is, in a roundabout way, what The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is complaining about. The title of Richard Flanagan’s new novel is taken from one of the better-known short poems of John Clare, “I Am!” Google being what it is, of course, there’s every chance that Amazon listings for Flanagan will have the knock-on effect of sending the underappreciated 19th-century nature poet down into the oubliette that is page three of the search results. ![]()
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