![]() ![]() The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, with its pervasive sense of slowly unfolding doom, is a book about vanishing - not just figuratively and literally, but also in an oddly liminal space between the two. This new one is racking up the accolades, too, but I must demur. Of his now eight novels, he is best known for the 2014 Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but virtually all of them have met with wide acclaim. Instead, we have the one he chose to write, which I feel does not achieve his desired outcome.įlanagan, who was born and raised in Tasmania, is inarguably the best known, most prolific, and most celebrated living Australian author. Still, I found myself thinking there are so many potential books inside The Living Sea of Waking Dreams that I wish Richard Flanagan had written. The job of a reviewer is to critique the book that has been written - that is, to interrogate what the author was attempting to achieve and then to assess whether he (in this instance) has been successful - not to complain that it wasn’t the book the reviewer wanted. ![]()
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