'Hard times and bleak houses', 15 November 2008, The Age

Richard Flanagan's new novel has moments of slow contemplation and harsh poetry, and is a beautiful addition to a significant body of work, says Michael Williams.

IN JANUARY this year, during an interview on Radio National, Richard Flanagan considered the subject of reviewers: "Australian literary criticism is a sort of dwarf-tossing competition in which good books get tossed by the dwarves."

I'm not sure I completely agree with him (sometimes good books are dwarfed by tossers) but it scares me into pointing out that Richard Flanagan is one of Australia's literary giants. At his best, he writes beautiful novels of extraordinary depth, novels infused with passion and fury, compassion and humanity.

He writes about Tasmania better than any other author: the near-mystical beauty of the Franklin River in 1994's Death of a River Guide; the desolation of the Central Highlands in 1997's The Sound of One Hand Clapping; even historical Tasmania in 2001's Gould's Book of Fish. His books aren't exactly the easiest-going novels on the shelf, but they deserve their status as modern classics.

But his last book, The Unknown Terrorist, was a different fish. More commercial in approach, less literary in style, it somehow managed to be both leaden and lightweight.

It's good for writers to reinvent themselves, and the motivation behind that novel - frustration with the political and cultural direction of Howard's Australia - was clear-eyed and worthwhile. Despite rave reviews overseas, it disappointed fans here.

Readers will be pleased to hear that with Wanting Flanagan is closer to familiar territory. He's (partly) back on Tasmanian turf, back to a historical milieu, back to moments of slow contemplation and harsh poetry. The tale is more pared back than his early novels, slightly more conventional, but in its own quiet way it demonstrates the same haunting gravitas.

It is 1839, and on Flinders Island the Protector of Aborigines presides over a community in rapid and bleak decline. His charges may well be learning the songs and catechisms he's teaching, but they are also dying at an alarming rate.

The arrival of the Governor of Van Diemen's Land, celebrated explorer Sir John Franklin, only heightens his awareness of the limitations of his work there. One of the brighter lights is the young girl Mathinna, unselfconscious and smart as a whip. So it is no surprise when the controlling Lady Jane Franklin insists that the couple will adopt Mathinna and give her all the opportunities of class and breeding.

Eighteen years later, in Manchester, Charles Dickens is approached by Lady Jane. Her husband has disappeared on an expedition to the Arctic, and is now alleged to have resorted to cannibalism before his death. Lady Jane implores the celebrated novelist to help rehabilitate her husband's name: he is, after all, an Englishman. He is not capable of such savagery.

Dickens, who has recently finished writing Hard Times, is deep in a malaise bordering on existential despair but the task sets him on a journey towards recovery. In alternating chapters, Flanagan follows these two threads, each providing their own meditation on questions of civilisation and savagery, and the relationship between impulses and restraint.

It's a lovely idea and for the most part compelling, but there's something that doesn't quite work.

The book's thematic preoccupations are somewhat overstated: we don't need to be told in so many different ways that "we all have appetites and desires. But only the savage agrees to sate them". Or that "a savage is someone who succumbs to his passions". Or that "control ... marked the English out as different from savages".

Some of the integration of Dickens' work with his life, and narrative asides that come through historical hindsight, feel a bit clunky too. When Lady Franklin dismisses Dickens as "no immortal like Thackeray", or we see Dickens' bleak state of mind influencing the outcome of Little Dorrit, it feels too clever by half. And while this isn't exactly historical fiction, it's hard to imagine that much of this will sit easily with the historians who were so troubled by Kate Grenville's historical licence with The Secret River.

But the broader points and ideas here are more important than whatever creative liberties its author has taken. This is a love story, a tribute to the soul, an insight into a crucial part of Australia's troubled past. The consequences of repressing one's passions, of attempting to control one's desires, play out in a number of different ways throughout this melancholy, even bleak book.

In an early scene, the Protector on Flinders Island strips down and dances with Mathinna's father, giving over for just one moment to the possibility of a different relationship with the universe. Despite his evident joy, the anxiety of surrender and an inherent English reserve spoil the moment for him. It is his duty to bring the indigenous Tasmanians around to his way of life rather than to share in theirs.

It is a moment of small tragedy in a book of big ones. Flanagan is a beautiful writer and Wanting is a beautiful and considered addition to his oeuvre. Hopefully the dwarves of Australian literary criticism will agree.

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