by Richard Flanagan
Harper Collins
The central characters in Wanting are real. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sir John Franklin, his relentlessly ambitious wife Lady Jane Franklin, and Mathinna, an aboriginal child from Flinders Island, Tasmania. They all have one thing in common. Richard Flanagan has reached into history and woven a skillful, fictional portrayal of lives yearning for the unreachable.
Flanagan was a boy when he first saw a portrait of Mathinna wearing a red dress at the Hobart museum. It haunted him. Painted by convict artist Thomas Brock, the portrait has served to keep alive her memory, although details of her life are sketchy.
While Sir John Franklin is Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Mathinna catches Lady Jane’s eye. Saving the child from ‘savagery’ becomes her mission. She adopts Mathinna, and so begins an experiment repeated countless times in Australia’s history. “What must happen,” Lady Jane says, “is the breaking of all bonds from birth . . . children must breath in the fresh air of civilisation, not the stinking miasma of forests.”
The Franklin’s retreat from Tasmania is ignominious. They leave Mathinna in an orphanage and return to London. When Sir John goes missing in the Arctic ice and accusations of cannibalism are flying around the city, Lady Jane solicits help from Charles Dickens. Her social standing is teetering and she asks him to write a rebuttal, even though his “latest novel was rumoured to be “sullen socialism, its plot implausible . . . ruined by his cheap pamphleteering.”
Flanagan has positioned his characters in their clearly defined places in history, weaving a fictional drama of their lives. His prose is spare and poetic as he moves back and forth between continents and story lines, following the lives of Dickens in London, the Franklins in Tasmania, and Mathinna. It seems effortless. He never loses sight of his characters or the deep, sometimes desperate yearning that drives them. Lady Jane Franklin desperately wants a child, Dicken’s heart wants a love he knows is possible. Mathinna aches to belong, but when she is abandoned by the Franklins, her ruin is inevitable.
In Flanagan’s own words, Wanting is “a meditation on desire (and) the cost of its denial”. He cautions us that his novel is a work of fiction, not a history. However, he does speak directly to the ‘catastrophe of colonialism’, a catastrophe which caused the degradation and ultimate demise of the Tasmanian aborigines. Only a few survived.
Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania, Australia. He is a screenwriter and author and won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish. Wanting is his fifth novel and is shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
Reviewer's note: Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep, the harrowing story of British solders in a Japanese prisoner of war camp being used as slave labour to build the Thailand/Burmese railway.
Reviewer's note: Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep, the harrowing story of British solders in a Japanese prisoner of war camp being used as slave labour to build the Thailand/Burmese railway.
