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'The price of desire', 25 October 2008, Canberra Times There's an inherent thrill that comes from witnessing an act of daring. And when that act of daring succeeds brilliantly, the effect is truly exhilarating. Such is the impact of Richard Flanagan's latest novel, Wanting, a breathtakingly audacious book that, in pondering the nature of desire, and the price to be paid when desire is denied, manages to stir heart and mind and soul. What makes this novel so startling an achievement is Flanagan's deft drawing together of the deleterious treatment of Aborigines in 19th-century Van Diemen's Land with the deep personal anguish of acclaimed novelist Charles Dickens. Linking the two threads which span 12 years, and which Flanagan interleaves throughout the novel is the search of Lady Jane Franklin for her husband, whose expedition to discover the North-West Passage has failed to return. The story begins in 1839. Sir John Franklin, the noted polar explorer and new Governor of Van Diemen's Land, is travelling with his wife to the settlement of Wybalenna on Flinders Island, one of several islands in Bass Strait to which Aborigines have been removed in order to protect them from white settlers. There, under the misguided watch of the relatively benevolent Protector, George Robinson, in a place where the natural wildness of the island is gradually giving way to an architecture that ''looked for all the world like some newly built street in a great modern town like Manchester'', the Aboriginal population is, inexplicably to Robinson, dying. It's while at Wybalenna that Jane Franklin becomes enchanted by a young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, declaring she will adopt the child and bring her up as her own. Sir John, always guided by his wife's ambition, duly concurs, declaring ''that it would be an experiment of the soul worth making, both for science and for God''. Mathinna becomes for Lady Jane yet another facet in her quest to transform Van Diemen's Land; to bring ''reform and enlightenment'', a new ''Golden Age'' founded on philosophy, science and learning. For Mathinna, such reform comes by way of a curriculum stressing ''natural virtues of faith, simplicity, goodness, self-sacrifice, tenderness and modesty''. And when all efforts to tame the spirit and essential nature of the child fail when she doesn't become ''white'' she is ultimately discarded When, having been recalled to England, John Franklin joins the expedition in search of the North-West Passage, he bears with him the torment occasioned by his time in Van Diemen's Land, and by his relationship with Mathinna, realising that ''you set out to discover a new land because you sense you have always been lost''. And when, nine years after the expedition first set out, never to return, Jane Franklin seeks to dispel rumours that the explorers, in their final throes, resorted to cannibalism, it's to Charles Dickens she turns. While revelling in the intellectual exercise of countering the rumours about the expedition, Dickens becomes haunted by visions of the men lost in the ice. He identifies in their plight a metaphorical reflection of his own life; he envisions himself frozen by his dissatisfaction with his personal life, his soul inexorably drained by his work: ''Dickens had the odd sensation of recognising himself as ice floes, falling snow, as if he were an infinite frozen world waiting for an impossible redemption.'' What engenders this personal torpor in Dickens is his determination to quash within himself his desire for something more, ''to discipline his own great undisciplined heart''. It's a denial that he perceives as the true mark of ''wisdom and civilisation'', but one that is sorely tested when he meets and falls in love with the young actress Ellen Ternan, noting in his journal, ''You can have whatever you want, only you discover there is always a price. The question is can you pay?'' The intrinsic complexity of Dickens's question is acutely rendered within the enthralling climax of Wanting. Watched by Jane Franklin, her thoughts heaving with the memory of ''a bedraggled child staring back at her'', Dickens takes to the stage with Ellen Ternan in The Frozen Waste, a play about the lost polar expedition. Intensely focused within these scenes is not only the extent of the price to be paid for answering desire, but also the concomitant cost that comes of refusing it. And it's in the balancing of those costs personal, social, spiritual in a thorough recognition rather than repression of desire, that a life is ultimately defined. This is a superb novel, studded with luminously realised moments. Flanagan has imbued the entire book with a Dickensian sensibility: the abandoned child, the lost hero who ultimately finds his redemption, the crushing sadness of one stream of the story balanced against the rapture of the other. And, in a narrative marked by starkly oppositional images savage and civilised, good and evil, harmony and discord, the ''stench and blackness'' of London and the fierce, blinding whiteness of the Arctic there are passages of writing here which Dickens himself couldn't have bettered: ''With hands that were at once very large and very gentle, that seemed like a sea eagle's nest made of gnarled eucalypt branches, the sawyer picked up Mathinna. Holding the small weight and trust of the child in his grasp, he began to fear that hate was beyond him.'' Wanting is a novel you want never to end. As a reader, I can offer no greater accolade. Diane Stubbings has worked as a writer, researcher and academic. © 2008 The Canberra Times |