Maybe it’s living in Tasmania where there are specific species that you’re aware of. Everything I know is vanishing: plants, animals, bird, fishes. “I just became conscious in the past seven or eight years of the way the world is vanishing. It is about all of these things and more, and to hear him discuss it is to get a sense of what he means when he refers to it as a book that came to him as a sort of “rising scream”. With the voracious and isolating appetites of the news cycle and social media. With an idea for a fable about the invisibility of middle-aged women. It started with the poetry and life of John Clare. It started with climate emergency and bushfires. It’s clear that for Flanagan this is a book with several inspirations. She is sick, she is tired, and she’s ready to kiss her children and bid farewell. Because their mother Francie is ready to die. With her two brothers – anxious, stammering, kind-hearted Tommy and brutally efficient, decisive Terzo – she’s trying to make sense of how to care for a loved one whose final days have arrived. The book tells the story of Anna, a successful architect whose structured life is broken apart by the medical decline of her ageing mother. That idea – about beauty and gratitude, about appreciation in the face of a disappearing world – lies at the heart of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and accounts for its seemingly contradictory impulses. I find it beautiful and I find in the truth of that beauty a form of hope.” I feel a sense of grateful wonder – just to feel wind on your face, to feel the seasons roll by, the company of friends – as I get older I become more astonished by these things. “In spite of everything, I find the world very beautiful. Despair is always rational, but hope is human. It’s written at a despairing time but I don’t feel despairing. “I didn’t want the book to be despairing. The world is, by and large, going to shit, and it’s doing it quickly. But the big topics that are consuming him at the moment are, perhaps inevitably, pretty grim. He is his customary beguiling mix of self-effacement and strongly held passion on big topics funny and generous and curious. The pace is leisurely, the range of subjects capacious.
He is as expansive and enjoyable a conversationalist as ever. He is amused and delighted by the reports about how well the book world is weathering the global pandemic: “Maybe that’s why books are doing well in Covid – nobody has to meet the writers.” In spite of everything, I find the world very beautiful Richard Flanagan, author A planned multi-city tour to launch the new book has been shelved, replaced by a recorded interview that will be beamed out to his readers everywhere. Flanagan is at home in Hobart, Tasmania, where the only thing observing social distancing, he says, are the bottles of hand sanitiser sitting neglected on the end of bars.
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