Review

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is an eloquent expression of Richard Flanagan's anger on the page

By Frank O'Shea
November 28 2020 - 12:00am
Richard Flanagan is angry about the state of Australia's environment. Picture: Getty Images
Richard Flanagan is angry about the state of Australia's environment. Picture: Getty Images
  • The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan. Knopf, $32.99.

It is 2019 and Richard Flanagan is angry. In his native Tasmania, fires are reducing the forests to vertical blackness, smoke and cinders are draping Hobart, "turning the air a tobacco brown. ... It was like living with a chronically sick smoker except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its foul and collapsing lungs." Add the sudden extinction of creatures of the air, sea and forest, organisms whose millions of years of survival were no match for what humans do. Meanwhile, for some there were family holidays in Hawaii.

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