As I read The Living Sea of Waking Dreams I wasn’t sure whether I would eventually dismiss or admire this book. What Flanagan does seems simple – obvious, maybe – and it’s also so depressing, but damn it, the man can write! The book is unashamedly partisan: it boldly thwacks the reader with a point of view over and over and makes no pretence that the author is hiding his hand. The stakes are high and there is no room for ambiguity about the novel’s most fundamental concerns. Climate change is a thing. Species are disappearing from the face of the planet and humans, on the whole, have not come to terms with what this means for the environment, or even for ourselves. Flanagan is a well-known environmentalist, and he has often expressed his concern for the natural world. He won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2024 for Question 7 but initially refused the prize because of Baillie Gifford’s investments in fossil fuels.

On a human level, The Sea of Living Dreams is about the slow decline of Francie, now 86 years old, who has a host of health complications that have put her in hospital. She has survived a bout of cancer, but she has dementia. She develops hydrocephalus. She suffers strokes. And her health only becomes more complicated as the story progresses: a broken femur; a urinary tract infection. The UTI leads to renal collapse and the hospital’s policy is that dialysis is unsuitable for anyone over 85 years old. Her adult children – Anna, an architect, Terzo, a venture capitalist, and Tommy, a failed artist – now face a dilemma. Do they allow Francie to die with dignity and avoid prolonging her agony, or do they bring the weight of their money and influence to bear so as to prolong Francie’s life indefinitely? For Anna and Terzo, their money and the treatments it can buy can help alleviate their guilt and allow them to continue with their lives uninhibited, whilever the treatments work. But Tommy, who normally looks after their mother, would rather she be allowed to die with dignity for her sake. Francie is suffering. But he not only lacks money, he lacks status in the family.

There is a clear correlation between Francie’s personal decline and the decline of the natural world. Fires are raging across Tasmania and the smoke and ash are reaching as far as Sydney. Meanwhile, Anna receives a text from Tommy saying that Francie has been put on strong antibiotics for blood poisoning. And having read that, Anna flicks to Instagram on her phone and sees images of ash blowing down streets, trees catching alight and people fighting a rearguard action to defend their towns. The sickness and the fires are one.

Added to this, something strange is happening. Animal species are disappearing at a remarkable rate, while Anna notices that she has lost the ring finger on her left hand. She suffered no accident or pain. It has simply vanished. Few seem to notice it gone. Eventually, there are more vanishings. Anna loses more body parts, even parts of her face. So do others. Anna observes that her son has lost “one eye and both ears . . . What remained was a mouth and a single eye that had somehow floated into the centre of his face.” Later, his transformation is complete. Left at his computer in the darkness of his room, Gus has been reduced, Grigor-like, to the fundamentals of his character: as a gamer, all that remains of Gus are “three fingers and a thumb – jerking back and forth like a frog leg in a high school experiment.” The vanishing body parts remain unexplained, typical of magic realism, which uses inexplicable, even impossible moments, within an otherwise realistic narrative to further a novel’s concerns. But Flanagan pushes the premise so far that it fundamentally becomes horror, a genre which often uses bodily defilement – the breaching of the self – to cause dread.

Consistent across Flanagan’s characters is the tension between bodily autonomy and the possibility of defilement. This includes the historical sexual abuse by a Marist priest which does not dovetail so well with the rest of the story, otherwise. Then there are the intrusive medical procedures used to keep Francie alive against her will. But for characters like Anna and Terzo, wealth appears to confer a level of bodily autonomy: “they had treated their bodies as their most precious investment of all, exercising, maintaining, preserving and enhancing them with all that their money could buy . . .” That the possibility of death remains equal for them seems ironic in the context of their capitalist power and status: “Nothing belongs to the old,” Anna realises, “other than property which you discover too late is worthless.” That Anna is plagued by the inexplicable vanishing of her own body is an affront to the certainty she felt her wealth had purchased. That the power of their wealth to prolong their mother’s life may be limited is also offensive.

This is why the novel might seem obvious sometimes, if we allow ourselves merely to connect the dots and feel we have it worked out. The correlation made between the vanishing of bodily parts, and the vanishing of animal species and the degradation of the environment works with the simplicity of basic mathematics, after all: this equals that. And we easily understand the connection between Francie’s failing body and the failing environment. It would seem that Flanagan has left us little to think about, as long as we accept that things are going to shit and we’re all complicit. But we have to admire the skill with which Flanagan draws these connections, because by making symbolic associations Flanagan also highlights the problem that action is negated because of the abstract nature of the problems and the concrete immediate bearing of our social world. For instance, the possibility that the Orange-bellied parrot might vanish from the earth remains an abstract problem in a world driven by consumption: “the great circus rolled on even when other life stopped or just grew too grotesque and terrifying to contemplate.” By analogy, and ironically, Anna inures herself against the realities of her own mother’s decline by constantly doomscrolling stories on social media which tell of the wider loss and decline throughout the world. Horror stories in the media remain abstract distractions against the realities of her personal life, regardless of their content. But the tale of personal horror allows Flanagan to focus attention on exactly what is at stake for our planet.

And this is where Flanagan’s narrative is possibly more subtle and nuanced than we might have credited. In Flanagan’s latest book, Question 7, he employs a similar strategy, by correlating the mass killing of Japanese civilians with the atomic bomb, with the slaughter of Aborigines in Tasmania. Of Chekhov’s story from which Flanagan named his own book, Question 7, Flanagan wrote:

Like so much of what Chekhov wrote, question 7 is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world, a superficial world, a frozen world of appearances, beneath which an entirely different world surges as if a wild river that at any moment might drown us.

Flanagan anticipated this disconnect between two worlds in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams:

Nowhere could Anna see evidence of a world wanting to take the matter [of the vanishings] seriously. Perhaps the more the essential world vanished the more people needed to fixate on the inessential world.

Inexplicably, people tend not to notice their own disintegrating bodies or those of others, which, by association, is as inexplicable as ignoring what is happening in the natural world. Media, consumption and daily life are a distraction, or they buffer us against the problems that are assailing the ‘essential world’: “From the moment she mentioned a vanished noise or ear lobe, other people would start talking about politics or Netflix or TikTok,” Anna observes.

Hence, the problem lies more deeply than the dictates of capitalism, the allures of consumption or the distractions of social media. When a group of venture capitalists get together Anna observes that they speak of trivial matters rather than “discover that their own lives were based on some fundamental lie . . . [that if] they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with.” Terzo, himself a venture capitalist, quips about using the family’s influence to assert their will for their mother’s treatment over the doctors’ advice, as though “they were a board of directors examining a newly corporate takeover.” But this, too, is a lie told against reality: the lie that unnaturally postponing death is life. Despite Terzo’s braggadocios quip, he also senses that there must be more to his life than his outward success: “that he was so much more than the investor, the venture capitalist, the successful businessman”. Terzo’s secret fear is that he has suppressed, even killed, a more essential self that may have contained “exceptional things”. Similarly, Anna understands herself only in the context of others and her work, and she perceives there is a difference between her professional life and the life their mother has led, her ambitions sacrificed to husband and family, but recompensed with purpose and love. Anna, however, while rich in professional associations feels “she lived in a perfect hell of solitude.”

Flanagan later made love the subject of Question 7. He recounts how Chekhov parodied arithmetic puzzles posed to children, but which were then formulated with a question at their end that could elicit no logical response: “Who loves longer, man or woman?” Flanagan was delineating between our world which is predicated upon certainties and facts, and a less rational conundrum which implies a disconnect with ineffable forces which really shape our world. For Flanagan, pointing at the problems that capitalism and consumerism pose for the natural world is not enough. To say that the problems exist is not enough. For Flanagan, the problem lies within the private ineffable places of our hearts and our willingness to face the problems and challenges of climate change, and to recognise that we are personally impacted by what is happening. This is the insight Anna has: “That what was really vanishing wasn’t all the birds and fish and animals and plants, but love.”

Another way to approach this is by understanding human culture as a barrier to the natural world, which exists also within our hearts. Tommy feels that “the battle to love is the battle to keep words at bay”. As he reflects upon his mother’s inability to speak any longer, Tommy questions, in a thought that comes close to breaking the fourth wall, “is translating experience into words an achievement at all?” Words, thought, social media, the human enterprise: all are a barrier to a connection with nature and to understanding what it needs. Francie, we are told several times, has entered a state more akin to an animal, which is meant to suggest her degraded physical condition, but also shows she is closer to a nature, if only human ingenuity, by way of life support, would get out of the way. Later, Anna realises that “words were now a wall between people rather than a bridge” and that words “had become a drone” in their constant use to shield them from reality.

How Flanagan concludes his narrative is something left to a personal reading of the novel. But it is a suitable ending that is worthy of its foray into magical realism. It is a novel that speaks to the author’s insight into the challenges facing the natural world, as well as our own natures. Its argument may seem simple, but as always, Flanagan is a subtle artist and his story speaks honestly, if somewhat apocalyptically, anticipating a world we might endure if we do not have the heart to act.