AustLit

'There is a telling moment in Life After Death, the 2015 BBC documentary about Richard Flanagan. All the Tasmanian writer’s novels are addressed chronologically during the film. Flanagan is prompted in each instance to explain the genesis of a work: the real-life inspiration, or those biographical or historical facts on which a particular fiction is based. All of which, dutifully and fluently, he does.' (Introduction)

'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel, is one of a slew of novels one expects to emerge from the shadow of the 2019–2020 bushfire season that darkened the skies of eastern Australia for weeks on end, scorching forests from Byron Bay to Kangaroo Island.' (Introduction)

'In this magical realist tale, Flanagan’s extinction metaphor is not subtle – but the fiction of the Anthropocene can’t afford to be.'

'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams begins, self-consciously, at the limits of language. Its opening pages are rendered in a prose style that is fragmented and contorted. Sentences break down, run into each other. Syntax is twisted into odd shapes that call into question the very possibility of meaning. Words seem to arrive pre-estranged by semantic satiation in a way that evokes Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett at their most opaque: ‘As if they too were already then falling apart, so much ash and soot soon to fall, so much smoke to suck down. As if all that can be said is we say you and if that then. Them us were we you?’' (Introduction)