I've read two Australian climate change novels this past week. [b:The Rain Heron|50014902|The Rain Heron|Robbie Arnott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1577524348l/50014902._SY75_.jpg|75025842] is told as a fable and largely left me unmoved, whereas [b:The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|54282408|The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|Richard Flanagan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1593219994l/54282408._SY75_.jpg|81442712] is uncomfortably anchored in the (pre-pandemic) present and was really tough to read. I found it unsettling and nerve-wracking, so alternated with lighter distractions. I've come across fiction that parallels the death of a person with the death of ecosystems before, but never in such exhaustive visceral detail. [b:The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|54282408|The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|Richard Flanagan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1593219994l/54282408._SY75_.jpg|81442712] follows Anna, who reads about environmental collapse on social media while her elderly mother Francie dies very slowly and painfully in hospital. Flanagan's analogy is agonising, as Anna and her siblings force medical intervention after medical intervention on Francie until she has no quality of life and is hardly living at all.

Anna counted how many pills Francie was now being daily fed - twenty-one - and when she thought about the pills her mother took it was obvious that while six pills were better than seventeen and seventeen better than twenty-one, what mattered was that twenty-one pills were better than death. Because anything was better than death, and beating death was really the whole point - the only point.
And for that reason Francie would just have to work as hard as she could that day and every day to follow in a future without end. If to live it took Francie working as hard as an Olympic gold medallist to get the whole twenty-one pills down every day, well, that was what it took. If it took living like a dog, well, that was that not still living? And, after all, wasn't living preferable to dying?

Anna and her brother Terzo cannot give in to death when there is the possibility that their mother might survive, an utterly understandable sentiment taken to cruel extremes that ignore her wishes. Flanagan dissects this refusal to accept death and parallels it with refusal to accept that we cannot control the environment:

Only her possibly demented mother saw Anna not as a thing, a type, but as a suffering human being. Anna deleted the line and swiped to a news feed. Numerous species had vanished forever in the fires as she had been drinking, there weren't even enough bees left, fire smoke was travelling all around the world, a politician was saying they shouldn't waste another word talking about climate change but simply adapt and become more resilient. How did you adapt to your own murder, wondered Anna as she watched a cat video. Was that what was happening? Were they adapting to their own extinction? Was she?

Flanagan captures the impossibility of understanding the world via the relentless bright fragments of social media rather well; this is something that novels don't often manage:

When Anna's bones finally healed she didn't return to her practise of running daily. Didn't go back to the gym. She observed with indifference her body refusing to rejuvenate, to grow hard and taut, to tighten and strengthen. What did she care if she were flabby flesh or haggard gristle? She had learned that people were remarkably unobservant, thinking they were seeing the same person when that person was vanishing before them. Bit by bit they dissolved and yet no-one seemed to notice. The more things changed the harder people stared into their screens, living elsewhere, the real world now no more than a simulacrum of the screen world, their real lives the shadow of their online lives. The more people vanished the more they asserted themselves online as if in some grotesque equation or transfer. Meme artist, influencer, blogger, online memoirist. She wondered if the more they were there the less they were here? Did she know?
No, thought Anna, she didn't know; she knew nothing, but it seemed to her at times that not only were people not seeing but perhaps - and it was this that struck her as more frightening than anything - they did not want to see.
And above all things, she wanted to see.

Although the novel is largely grounded in horribly realistic details, it includes a fantastical element of vanishing body parts. I found this the least powerful part. It didn't seem necessary to make this theme visually literal, given that the sense of loss and dread of individual and species death already pervading the entire book. I think [b:The Memory Police|37004370|The Memory Police|Yōko Ogawa|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1544335119l/37004370._SY75_.jpg|7310932] used the vanishing conceit more adeptly. Nonetheless, I was impressed that [b:The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|54282408|The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|Richard Flanagan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1593219994l/54282408._SY75_.jpg|81442712] does something I wrote about in my review of [b:Dreamland|54970000|Dreamland|Rosa Rankin-Gee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618159442l/54970000._SX50_.jpg|85740154]: confronts the reality of climate change via the reality of death. This works very well, making it a more powerful and frightening climate novel than others I've come across. It also makes for a stronger and more definite ending than the ambiguity of most such fiction I've read. Terzo and Anna die before Francie, both in accidents. Tommy, the only remaining sibling, has the machines keeping Francie alive switched off and lets her go. He is left caring for his grand-daughter, whose parents are both hospitalised by mental health issues. The treatment of generation gaps in this novel is really fascinating. At the very end, the reader is shown that the orange-bellied parrot is not extinct yet. This hints at hope, while demonstrating that our best efforts to save specific species could still easily fail.

I don't think it's a coincidence that such a powerful climate change novel was written in Australia, given it is a wealthy Anglophone country seeing deadly extremes of heat and fire as the planet warms. Flanagan asks how much longer Australians, and humanity in general, can deny or fight the reality of this. [b:The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|54282408|The Living Sea of Waking Dreams|Richard Flanagan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1593219994l/54282408._SY75_.jpg|81442712] frightened me more than any other climate change novel of recent years, and for that I commend it. ( )

Needy and self indulgent. ( )

Almost DNF’ed but some parts (the realist ones) were too strong not to follow through to the conclusion. ( )

“It wasn’t enough for Terzo that their mother had not died. It wasn’t enough that she lived in her sea of waking dreams. In Terzo’s view, she had to live like us, rationally, in a rational universe. And as there was to be no death, nor could there be any other life.”

Eighty-seven-year-old Francie is in a Tasmanian hospital. Her health is declining. Her three adult children, Anna, Terzo, and Tommy, decide to keep her alive as long as possible, requiring ever-increasing efforts. Anna, the primary character, experiences vanishing body parts, as if she is being erased, and no one notices. The story is set against a backdrop of the recent Australian wildfires.

This book portrays how guilt can negatively influence actions. The kids love their mother, so shouldn’t they do everything possible to keep her alive? Isn’t life better than death? Even when Francie begs to be “let go” they willfully misunderstand her. It raises the issue of quality of life. [Obviously, people currently dealing with these situations may want to avoid this book for now.]

The author comments on how social media distracts people from addressing important matters: “The more things changed the harder people stared into their screens, living elsewhere, the real worlds now no more than a simulacrum of the screen world, their real lives the shadow of their online lives. The more people vanished the more they asserted themselves online as if in some grotesque equation or transfer.”

It also provides commentary on the decline of the natural world and the importance of engaging in it. The writing is powerful. It is a sad story, and at times deeply disturbing, but definitely thought-provoking.
( )

Profound, beautiful read about the tragic path caused by our ignorance on climate change. ( )