Book Review: Wanting by Richard Flanagan

One of the key objections I had to Richard Flanagan’s last novel, The Unknown Terrorist, was that it put the ideology first: making a political point at the expense of the characters and the plot.  This isn't at all the case in Wanting.  Indeed, in Wanting, as in Gould’s Book of Fish, the whole notion of historical fact becomes subservient to the greater truth -- that of human nature -- the most fundamental of emotional responses and how they underpin the making of history. Wanting is a novel that traces the trajectory of desire.

The novel follows the way desire, and its flipside, repression, pushes us forward. Although in Wanting, which begin in 1839, time is as much a shifting illusion as the notion of "mastering passion", or the difference between “savage” and “civilised”. It’s the end of the war between the Van Diemonian (Tasmanian) tribes, and the “Empire”. The remaining tribes are broken: “scabby, miserable and often consumptive,” and under the “care” of the Protector, a man who believes that he is doing good by converting and protecting them, while deep down knowing instinctively that the fact that they are “dying like flies” is partly his doing. Like many of the characters in this novel, he has had his moment of illumination: a brief sense of beauty and freedom overwhelming him during a dance festival, but that is tamped and stifled into something ugly and paternal. King Romeo (Towterer) is a man who the Protector thinks of as an equal, and when after his death, his daughter Mathinna becomes part of the Protector's group. After seeing her dance, Lady Jane Franklin is moved by a maternal response to adopt Mathinna. That response -- the "wanting" — is subsumed into a kind of scientific experiment which involves an attempt at educating the native out of Mathinna.

Fifteen years later, Mathinna has already been sent to her doom at an orphanage, the experiment abandoned, and Sir John has escaped on his final, fatal voyage. Lady Jane is in London to ask Charles Dickens to help her clear her husband’s name from the accusation of cannibalism. This sets in motion a parallel journey in the opposite direction for Dickens as he moves from a state of stifled paralysis to one where he gives in to his desire:

He could no longer discipline his undisciplined heart. And he, a man who had spent a life believing that giving in to desire was the mark of a savage, realised that he could no longer deny wanting. (241)

Like good poetry, Wanting is full of correspondences, connections, and vivid imagery. The most powerful is the black swan. In a lesser author’s hand, Lady Jane’s naming of Mathinna as Leda would be too obvious. Somehow Flanagan pulls it off, as he does the wreck of Mathinna by Sir John Franklin dressed in a black swan suit. The poetic use of colour continues through the "resolute black of an arctic winter", the terrible white of the ice flows, the white kangaroo suit, the black skin, the cygnets served for dinner, the red dress and its ultimate transformation from dress to scarf to noose. Throughout the book, the visual imagery is both horrible and beautiful, staying with the reader in the rich depiction of character and setting. Much of the book is written in prose so tersely beautiful it could easily work in stanzas:

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse and She Wore Emerald Then. …

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