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the complete review - fiction

Wanting

by
Richard Flanagan

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : fine, dark novel of human longing and personal isolation

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Not in the same class as Gould's Book of Fish, but a fine piece of work

  From the Reviews:

• "The novel boasts many symmetries and ironies, which are the stuff of poetry rather than history. Franklin seems often an absence, a negative space. Dickens, looking at his reflection in a mirror, saw "a face that could have been any man and no man, somebody who in his relentless mimicry of everybody had become nobody". Which sounds remarkably like Jorge Luis Borges on Shakespeare. Is there any higher compliment ?" - Don Anderson, The Australian
  
  
• "We are hit with implications of venality, lust, and lost virginity as if with a shovel. It is a Victorian soap opera, and Flanagan rather lamely resorts to the locutions of that genre. (...) But my objection is not the theme. This is a book of stick figures, the characters cobbled from other people’s research. (...) Worse, the story is poorly told, pieced out in abrupt and broken segments that seem more like interruptions." - Alexander Theroux, Boston Globe
  
  
• "What Flanagan has done, and it does seem to be the current trend in the post-colonial novel, is show how the colonised and the home territories are inextricably linked, however far apart they might seem at first glance. (...) In less capable hands the different strands of this artfully constructed novel could have made for bad neighbours, but here the affinity is made plain." - Giles Foden, The Guardian
  
  
• "In Wanting, Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human connection in its many forms -- that commingling of compassion, curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract nouns: love." - Jon Fasman, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Though Wanting is a flawed and much slighter work than Fish -- an uneven chamber piece, compared with a glorious, full-blown symphony -- it still recounts a haunting and powerful story. (...) The one serious problem with Wanting is Mr. Flanagan’s decision to play fast and loose with the facts in reimagining Sir John’s life." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "So brief a summary does little justice to the complexities and nuances of this dense and fascinating novel. In tracing the tangents where these contrasting and various lives intersect and influence one another; in analyzing how a random encounter, placed under the microscope, can reveal a multitude of unexpected links and adjacencies, Flanagan explores both human history and human nature. (...) Wanting is, in its way, as interesting a fictional exercise as Flanagan’s celebrated and unclassifiable third novel, Gould’s Book of Fish (2001). Flanagan takes a literary form -- in Gould’s, metafiction and unreliable narration; in Wanting, Victorian-style omniscience -- and bends it forcefully to the essential themes that his fiction subsists on" - William Boyd, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The narrative scope is ambitious" - The New Yorker
  
  
• "This is a captivating tale of cruelty and disappointment, but Wanting periodically flashes forward to another equally engaging story in England, a jungle of a different kind, brought to life with the same lurid and startling detail." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Wanting weaves together several different storylines, and moves back and forth in time in the nineteenth century. It is based on several historical incidents, including the lost Arctic expedition of explorer Sir John Franklin, Franklin's time as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), Mathinna, the aboriginal girl the Franklin's (temporarily) adopted, Charles Dickens' defense of Franklin when he was accused of having resorted to cannibalism on his ill-fated expedition, and the production of The Frozen Deep, a play Dickens wrote with Wilkie Collins, which was also how he met Ellen Ternan, for whom he would leave his wife.
       Childish innocence and the ideal of family are central to the story, but they remain out of reach. The Franklins themselves remained childless, while Dickens' was gravely affected by the death of his young daughter -- but, as Flanagan, notes:

Few had gambled so boldly and profited so handsomely as Lady Jane, the exemplary devoted wife, or Dickens, the very bard of family. But celebrating family was one thing. Practising it, Dickens had discovered, was something else again.

His dreams were full of their dances and songs, the beauty of their villages, the sound of their rivers, the memory of their tendernesses, yet they still kept dying and nothing he did altered it. They kept dying and dying, and he -- who had lived in their old world, who continued to work to make this new world perfect in its civilisation, its Christianity, its Englishness -- he was their Protector, but still they kept dying.

He understood little of people generally and had, in society, tended to leave them to his wife, who assured him she did. In this, too, he could now see he was mistaken. She simply lacked his humility.

     She realised she had never understood him. He was unstoppable, undeniable, he bent the world to his schemes and dreams as surely as he did his characters. And she knew that her part, henceforth, would be the fat and hopeless housekeeper, the hysteric, the invalid, the harridan and the virago.

- M.A.Orthofer, 13 July 2009

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Links:

• Grove Press publicity page
• Profile in the Sydney Morning Herald

• ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
• Barnes & Noble Review
• The Bookbag
• The Book Chick
• Boston Globe
• Countercurrents.org
• Curled up with a Good Book
• A fool on a hill...
• The Guardian
• Kirkus Reviews
• Literary Corner Cafe
• The Los Angeles Times
• MostlyFiction Book Reviews
• Musings of a Literary Dilettante's Blog
• The New Yorker
• Publishers Weekly
• Read in a Single Sitting
• Reading Matters
• Readings
• The Resident Judge of Port Phillip
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Seeing the World through Books
• The Washington Post
• The Washington Times

• Official site

• First Person
• Gould's Book of Fish

• See Index of Australian literature at the complete review
• See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction

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About the Author:

       Australian author Richard Flanagan was born in 1961 and has won numerous literary prizes for his first three novels.

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