The Living Sea of Waking Dreams Book Review

by Catalina Bonati

3/5 stars

Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) is about three adult siblings whose mother is on the verge of death, but they opt to keep her alive for as much as possible against her wishes. As things like her mother’s health and personal relationships slip out of her control, Anna, one of the siblings, finds her body parts start to blur and disappear one by one.

The book is written in lyrical prose that at times feels like a stream of consciousness, especially at the beginning through Tommy’s perspective. The characters express rage and despair at the state of the world—its politics, climate, and effects of tourism on Tasmania and Australia. This book was published in 2020, assumedly it was written a couple of years before, but it very much reads like a pandemic book. The anger at the world, the sense of loss that envelops the character’s mental state, the frustration at each other, the lack of connection, and the constant concern over health place this book squarely in the global angst over quarantine. There’s an element of magical realism when it comes to Anna spontaneously missing body parts and sometimes spotting other people whose bodies have also blurred and fragmented.

The story focuses on Tommy, Anna, and Terzo, but Anna is the protagonist. She is a rather unlikable character who seems as if she can’t be bothered with her mother’s health and who hates her younger brother because he chose a creative career and is not traditionally successful. As she loses her grasp on love for her close family she loses body parts, which seems inspired by Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. The loss of body is related to lost youth, lost love, and loss of control, and although it is disturbing when it first occurs, it loses impact once it begins to happen all the time, even when it is meant to be a powerful moment.

This book is bare bones in terms of its plot; it revolves mostly around themes. It is essentially about ageing, death, the loss of agency that comes in old age, and the medical approach to slow death and age. The siblings are cruel in their disregard towards their mother’s wishes, who lets it be known that she wishes to die but they decide to keep her alive. The siblings are also cruel towards each other—their mix of shame and admiration towards each other is apparent in every interaction. Later on, when one of them dies, their death does not seem to affect their family at all, the attention of the story resting on the health of their mother. When someone else dies, the death is so strangely recounted that one can barely tell what happened, taking away from its gravity.

To conclude, this story is a contemporary, literary story which lies mostly in descriptions, abstractions, and reflections rather than plot or actions. The characters are frustrating to read about; however, their actions and feelings are contrasted to the current climate crisis and although their emotions feel out of place and unempathetic, the author places them squarely in the heart of Tasmania and Australia in the current climate age, thus questioning the reader’s perception of them as displaced. Their actions towards their mother are morally ambiguous, though mostly vicious.

This book is recommended to those who invest deeply in contemporary literary fiction, who don’t care about plot progression or moral ambiguity, and to those who enjoy magical realism and climate fiction as well as the moral questioning of euthanasia.