Sydney Morning Herald

'Passionate voice of Tasmania puts heart into history', 15 November 2008, The Sydney Morning Herald. Reviewed by Stella Clarke.

Richard Flanagan explores the energy of desire in a novel that brings together two worlds, with tragic consequences.

VANDEMONIAN testifier Richard Flanagan rages against silence and embraces risk. Remember him glowering out from that winning Archibald mugshot? He is internationally acclaimed, a winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Gould's Book Of Fish and has been called the voice of Tasmania, which, in profound ways, he is. His physical immersion in its landscape, devotion to its environmental fate and literary absorption in its history make him so.

And what a voice! In any war against political untruth or the inadequate truths of history, he trusts that words are weapons. His imaginative domain is tough, marvellous and as humanly replenishing as any wilderness.
Though Flanagan's fiction can be fierce and declarative of horrors, he lines up on the side of love. His bold artistic vigour and moral courage give him stature, which must be why he felt able to say that Australian literary criticism is a dwarf-tossing competition in which good books get tossed by dwarves. Faced with the magnificence of Wanting, though, it behoves me to be an obsequious, dwarfish tosser. This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several more.

In Wanting, Flanagan leaves behind the outraged, political territory of his last work, The Unknown Terrorist, his indictment of John Howard's sickening, wrong-headed Australia. He returns, instead - as have Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, Roger McDonald and Thomas Keneally - to the seductive resources of the nation's foundational stories. These leading writers are creating a rich and vital mythology, responding perhaps to the pain of evolution from a swamp of shame or perhaps to the irresistible quality of the era, so uniquely replete with narrative temptations.

What could possibly be the link between Charles Dickens, icon of English high culture and tradition, and a battered Aboriginal girl dead in a puddle? When he studied at Oxford, Flanagan has said, dons called him "convict" for fun; this is a connection they might not enjoy. The link is the feted, and doomed, Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land. It is formally retrievable as documented history but for Flanagan its substance is rooted in undocumented history, in needs unmet and love not given. It concerns the rancid hypocrisies of British imperial idealism.

In England, Lady Jane persuades a flattered Dickens publicly to defend her late husband, whose explorative expedition has been lost in the Arctic, from rumours of cannibalism. Historians now agree that Franklin may well have been reduced to cannibalism but for Flanagan that is beside the point. As Dickens excitedly formulates his defence, first in essays in Household Words then in a roaringly successful theatre production (alongside Wilkie Collins) entitled The Frozen Deep, Flanagan winds back to the Franklins' greater crime.

What happened in Van Diemen's Land, he suggests, is what led to Franklin's quest for polar oblivion. Behind his heroism lie his wife's stifled grief at her childlessness, her compensatory ambitions and her ruthlessness.
This novel's title, and Flanagan's final explanatory note, state his belief plainly. History is about wanting and rolls out in accord with suppressions and expressions of human yearning. He pursues the theme with a force of purpose. It is not an artistic conceit but a proclamation of faith.

He draws in Dickens's failing marriage, his dead child and his adulterous love for a young actress. Crucial, too, is Dickens's rabid, underdog espousal of ruling-class treachery in relation to the empire's colonial subjects, the unexpected flip-side to his social conscience.

Flanagan brings together worlds impossibly remote from each other, though horribly, intimately linked. He moves between Victorian England and settler Tasmania, places poles apart but bound together by institutional savagery. The dim, mesmeric cacophony of newly industrialised Britain and the bedazzlement of aggrandising exhibitions are set against the bleak filth of a scraggy penal settlement on the other side of the Earth. Both are framed by images of the icy, black wastes of the Arctic winter that saw Franklin perish.

Wanting probes matters similar to Grenville's new novel, The Lieutenant. In particular, at its centre, is affection between a colonial Englishman and a native girl. In each, the girl is emblematic of Aboriginal innocence and vulnerability but with terribly different consequences.

Grenville selected and embellished a documented relationship that was faintly resonant with hope. Lieutenant Rooke, a misfit in the colonial machine, discovers an authentic, natural world in his friendship with quicksilver Tagaran. Grenville embalms their unusual rapport in her novel, paying homage to the vision of reconciliation, an expression of contemporary desire.

Flanagan, on the other hand, uses the relationship to explore the raw energy of desire itself, whether warped or unleashed, as a prime mover of history. He has Franklin, also a reluctant tyrant, go through a process of awakening to his best and purest self, when his wife adopts the effervescent Leda, or Mathinna as her own people know her. What results, however, in line with the vicious history of white Tasmanian settlement, which nearly wiped out the indigenous population, is violation. Franklin is cast as Leda's rapacious, sin-black swan. The Lieutenant is a fairytale when set against Flanagan's unflinching epic hold on this fateful meeting of peoples.
As a condition of objectivity, a requirement for the cool discernment, or disinterment, of truth, academic historical discourse invariably muffles emotion. The part it plays in events is repressed and irrecoverable.

Flanagan's storytelling puts the heart back into history. It is infused with a massive strength of feeling, with anger and compassion. Lady Franklin's sorrow cuts. Catherine Dickens (despite her husband's best efforts to tamper with the record) suffers. Dickens aches. Sir John Franklin's journey into his personal heart of darkness chills. Finally, and critically, Mathinna's gut-wrenching end approaches with unrelenting pathos. It won't just make you sorry; it will slowly crack your heart like Franklin's ship in pack-ice.

Dickens would have applauded Flanagan's style, if not his sympathies. Flanagan exposes the cathartic power of the histrionic, gives us the novelty of a steam-train ride, pumped with intimations of encroaching misery and shocking accident. His prose pounds on with locomotive force, the narrative twists into shapes heavy with symbolism and foreboding.

This is no literary anaesthetic; Wanting shakes us rudely from our stupors, wakes us up to history. There can be no author more passionate or unfettered than Flanagan.

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