NUMBER: 102

Genre:Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 250

Satisfaction rating: 10.0

OVERVIEW:

A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is adopted by the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, to show that the savage can be civilised. When Sir John disappears while looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jane turns to the great novelist Charles Dickens for help. Wanting is a meditation on love, loss and the way life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

For a small book, Wanting is not short on substance. The novel is a return to form for Flanagan, a relief after his last effort The Unknown Terrorist which disappointed me greatly. Now, he has turned his attention from xenophobia to genocide, moving from a contemporary paranoid vision of the war on terror to the horrors of colonial rule in Van Diemen’s Land during the early 1800s, a period which saw the attempted extermination of the indigenous people of the island. Those familiar with Flanagan’s work will also note that the setting is a return to his native Tasmania, a subject of four out of his five novels thus far.

As I read it, this is a story of obsession, an allegory of the colonialist’s obsession with spreading their culture, religion and disease, protecting their legacy, while destroying all else in their path. Flanagan resists drawing on the emotionally charged bloodshed of the systematic hunt for the natives, rather choosing to focus his story on what remains, the embers of a race slowly dying. It chronicles two seemingly disparate stories spread a decade apart, that of Governor Sir John Franklin and his wife’s social experiment in adopting a young Aboriginal girl Mathinna, and that of Charles Dicken’s defence of Sir John Franklin character some years later after he perished in search of the north-west passage. To explain the story further would ruin the book.

Inspired by actual events, Flanagan pulls no punches in doing a hatchet job on both Sir John Franklin and Charles Dickens. And if you believe even half of what is written in this novel you will be left with a sour taste of each man, leaders in their field yet spineless to the very core. I suspect Flanagan’s portrait (which is sourced from many texts listed on his site) may come under some fire, but any such labels will in fact play into the novel’s sub-text, one of perception over fact, a sub-text also featured in Flanagan’s earlier masterpiece Gould’s Book of Fish.

But for me Franklin and Dickens are supporting players. It is the story of Mathinna which provides to depth to this novel, a testament to the fact that a culture cannot be easily bred out of existence, despite the dire consequences. Stories such as this are the very ones discarded by white-man’s history, they are a stain on the legacy of our country, I am thankful that writers with the skill, intelligence and passion of Flanagan are turning their critical eye to these events. For this is not just an indigenous story to tell, but one for all Australians to face up to.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on the official site.

Last Modified :January 11th, 2009 Filed under : The Log: novels Navigate : Previous post / Next post