Wanting

by Richard Flanagan

One of our most inventive and important international literary voices, Richard Flanagan now delivers Wanting, a powerful and moving tale of colonialism, ambition, and the lusts and longings that make us human.

It is 1841. In the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, a barefoot aboriginal girl sits for a portrait in a red silk dress. She is Mathinna, the adopted daughter of the island’s governor, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, and the subject of a grand experiment in civilization -- one that will determine whether science, Christianity, and reason can be imposed on savagery, impulse, and desire. Years later, somewhere in the Arctic, Sir John Franklin has disappeared with his crew and two ships on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. England is horrified by reports of cannibalism filtering back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, for whom Franklin’s story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own life.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Australia, Historical, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Novels

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Richard Flanagan (born 1961) is an author, historian and film director from Tasmania, Australia. He was president of the Tasmania University Union and a Rhodes Scholar. Each of his novels has attracted major praise. His first, Death of a River Guide (1994), was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, as were his next two, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) and Gould's Book of Fish (2001). His earlier, non-fiction titles include books about the Gordon River, student issues, and the story of conman John Friedrich.
Two of his novels are set on the West Coast of Tasmania; where he lived in the township of Rosebery as a child. Death of a River Guide relates to the Franklin River, Gould's Book of Fish to the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping to the Hydro settlements in the Central Highlands of Tasmania.

Reviews

[فايز غازي Fayez Ghazi · Rating 2 out of 5]

- رواية تاريخية ينسجها "فلانغان" بخياله، تجري يجزءها الأول على ارض فانديمن التي تعرف بإسم "جزيرة تاسمانيا" حالياً جنوب استراليا، وتتحدث عن آخر السكان الأصليين وبجزءها الثاني في لندن مع شارلز ديكينز كشخصية رئيسية ثانية. الرابط بين الجزئين هو المسرحية التي تحاكي قصة استكشاف القطب الجنوبي لحاكم تازمانيا السيد فرانكلين.

- المئة صفحة الأولى معاناة مع البطئ والسرد الممل، لكن الأمور تتغير بعد ذلك حيث تبدأ الخيوط بالتشابك والقصة بالتكون والترابط.

- قصة الأميرة السوداء "ماثينا" المأسوية منذ موت والدها ونقلهم من الأرض الرئيسية، فالتبني و "التمدن"، فدار الأيتام فالسكر والدعارة والموت اتت لتلخص حال معظم الشعوب الأصلية التي ابادتها الغزوات وأقامت مدناً على انقاضها من امريكا حتى استراليا..

- لم استسغ جزء السيد شارلز ديكينز، الشخصية كانت مسطحة ولم تصلني، بقيت كشخصية كاريكاتورية على الورق.

- الترجمة كانت جيدة بشكل عام. الأسلوب الكتابي كان جيداً، وقد اكون ظلمت الكاتب بقرائته بعد "ماريو فارجاس يوسا"!!

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and sometimes moving historical novel in which Flanagan's fiction is mostly in imagining the details behind real historical events.

This book has two distinct strands, linked by the explorer Lord Franklin, who served as governor of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the 1840s, where he and his second wife Jane adopted a young Aboriginal girl Mathinna, who is one of the book's two main characters.

The other main character is Charles Dickens, who met the actress Ellen Ternan, who became his mistress and companion in his last two decades while acting opposite her in a play (written by his friend Wilkie Collins and refined by Dickens) about Franklin's doomed final voyage in search of the North West passage. Dickens' interest in the expedition was partly driven by a desire to exonerate Franklin from accusations (recently proved true) that his men resorted to cannibalism in their desperate attempts to survive.

Mathinna's story is ultimately tragic, as the Franklins' attempts to bring her up like a daughter foundered, and they gave her up to a brutal orphanage before returning to England at the end of their term. She died at the age of just 17, by then an alcoholic prostitute. Her fate mirrors the wider tragedy of the Tasmanian aboriginals, the last of whom died later in the 19th century.

Some of the minor characters are clearly fictional, and in Flanagan's account Mathinna is the only child in the Franklin house whereas according to Wikipedia there was also a daughter.

Flanagan's attempts to unify his themes are only partially successful, but both strands contain fascinating insights and the book is a pleasure to read.

[عبدالخالق كلاليب · Rating 5 out of 5]

معقدة.. متناقضة.. عميقة ..مذهلة..
هكذا جاء في وصف الرواية على الغلاف الخلفي, والحقيقة إنها كذلك حقاً
ريتشارد فلاناغان روائي يجب أن يُقرأ
كاتب رصين ومتمكن, ذو أسلوب صعب ومعقد ولكنه ساحر وعميق, يمتلك رؤية ثاقبة , يجيد الوصف الدقيق والجميل دون زخرفة أو إطناب
تحليل ممتاز لدواخل الشخصيات وللنفس الإنسانية
نجد في هذه الرواية تصاعداً تدريجياً في الإبهار والجمال من البداية البطيئة والمبهمة والرتيبة نوعاً ما إلى النهاية (أو النهايات) القاسية والصادمة
يقول أوسكار وايلد : (إن من واجبنا إعادة كتابة التاريخ)
هذه الرواية تحقق تلك المقولة بشكل رائع
بناء روائي متين ومثير للإعجاب حقاً, ويستحق القراءة بالتأكيد

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Middle of the eighteen-hundreds on the penal colony ofn Van Dieman's Land and temporary home of the man they call"the Protector" sent to clean up the so called native problem. The Governor of the colony, Sir John Franklin and his wife Jane are coming to inspect the colony. Jane who is unable to have a child, falls for one of the laughing and dancing native children young Mathinna and adopts her, calling it a sociological experiment.

Back in England Dickens, who is stifled and unhappy in his marriage takes up the cause of the Franklins and defends Sir John in the press. Years have passed and Sir John's fatal last trip to Antarctica has caused articles to be written about the discovery of supposed cannibalism by Sir John and his men. My favorite part of this segment of the story was that the reader gets to meet Wilkie Collins, whom I have always liked more than Dickens.

This story skips around, back and forth and I never really felt that I knew the characters, they were just people I was reading about. It was a novel that seemed to be about these people, famous people and their ability to lie to themselves, while trying to keep up appearances. None of them were as they appeared to the public and only Mathinna tried to stay the same. Eventually, she had to conform, becoming the exact opposite of what first attracted Jane to her, yet she never feels as if she fits in. Sir John creepy longing for a young girl was nauseating, as it should be.

The despair of colonial life with very few light moments. The wanting of something that could never be because expectations were unrealistic.
Different read, can't say I liked it but I did admire the writing.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating read! Flanagan at his best!

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The distance between savagery and civilisation is the extent we advance from desire to reason... As for the noble savage, I call him an enormous nuisance and I don't care what he calls me. It is all one to me whether he boils his brother in a kettle or dresses as a seal. He can yield to whatever passion he wishes, but for that very reason he is a savage.." Thus the fictional Charles Dickens who is engaged by Lady Jane Franklin to refute the 'slander' cast on her husband that he, one of "England's finest" boiled his brother in a kettle when reduced to starvation on an ill-fated trip to find the North-West passage. Flanagan interweaves Dickens' journey to self-realisation with the story of Mathinna, an Aborigine girl from the very last of the Van Diemonian Aborigines who was adopted as a kind of scientific experiment by the Franklins. This is truly what a novelist can do, and should do - he takes the bare bones of the known facts about these historical characters, and fleshes them out (unfortunate word when dealing with purported cannibalism) to real, vivid, living people. At once disturbing and funny, distressing and uplifting, Flanagan has created something magical in this book. I'd call it perfect, and would love to go straight back to the beginning and start all over again. And it would be worthwhile.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Dickens, in domestic despond. Lady Jane Franklin, childless, and now a husband lost. Mathinna, her bare feet searching for answers in the aboriginal muck. All wanting.

Like Colum McCann, Richard Flanagan here takes the threads of historical moments and splices them thematically. The writing is superb. I fairly inhaled this.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

We all want things. Sometimes the things we think we want are not the things we really want. Usually, the wanting is better than having. These are all familiar feelings that Richard Flanagan plays with in the aptly-named Wanting. His exploration of these ideas is deft and interesting, but the book lacks an overall unity to make it truly memorable or amazing.

I’m perplexed by Wanting’s structure, which is split between the early 1840s, when Franklin was governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), and the 1850s-60s, when Dickens is approaching the height of his popularity and discovering his own powers as an amateur performer—not to mention the allure of Ellen Ternan. It’s not so much this split that perplexes me as it is Flanagan’s desire to link these two stories of Franklin, his wife, and Mathinna with Dickens and Ternan. The parallels just aren’t there. The inside cover copy of this edition claims that “several lives become conjoined by unexpected events and tragedies”, but they really don’t.

I suppose the title should give some indication of the connection Flanagan seeks to create: desire. Lady Franklin desires to see Mathinna (and, by way of synecdoche, the Aborigine population as a whole) “civilized”. She wants, in her own well-intentioned but still racist way, to disprove the brand of racists who believe that the indigenous peoples of other lands are instinctively “savage”, noble or otherwise. Sir John Franklin goes along with his wife’s projects, mostly out of habit rather than any true interest or desire—and then he finds himself drawn to Mathinna. Meanwhile, a few decades later, Dickens grapples with feelings of self-pity and guilt as he realizes he no longer desires his wife; this gets worse when he meets the young actress Ellen Ternan and realizes he’s attracted to her.

On their own, these are two interesting stories. I could happily have read a story set in 1840s Tasmania, following the Franklins from their accession to the governorship in 1839 until their departure in 1843 and beyond. I’d have happily engaged with the complicated colonial undertones present in the attempts to civilize Mathinna and assimilate her into British culture, mirrored by the Protector’s project to do much the same to Mathinna’s entire village. Flanagan’s writing is lively; he knows how to create scenes that sustain interest, and he has a good sense of description, if not dialogue. I have no doubt he could have created something compelling.

Similarly, I was very impressed by how Flanagan handles the characterization of a fictional Dickens. That’s not something one undertakes lightly. As a literary juggernaut who has a relatively well-documented life, a massive corpus of works, and plenty of things written about him, Dickens is a character that is easy to research but probably difficult to emulate. In particular, I liked how Flanagan put words into Dickens’ mouth that I can believe Dickens might actually have said: “Unlike you, Douglas [Jerrold], she [Jane Austen] didn’t understand that what pulses hard and fast through us must be there in every sentence”. Flanagan’s Dickens comes alive and entertains me even as it educates me about Dickens’ life. It also made me really want to read some more Dickens soon, which is perhaps the biggest praise I can give it.

Yet I remain unable to reconcile these two plots. I don’t really understand why Flanagan chose to pair these two stories about desire, to interlace them in such a sterile way. And in addition to being a very short book despite this combination of two stories, Wanting is also sparse in the writing department. Though I’ve praised Flanagan’s use of description and his characterization of Dickens, I do think much of his action falls flat. There is surprisingly little dialogue in this book; he resorts mostly to telling us what people think, where they come from, what they want, instead of showing us through their actions. This makes the book feel slower and far less memorable—the difference between skimming the surface of a newly-discovered ocean and just diving straight in.

It was good in its own way, but Wanting seems to suffer from an essential flaw of structure that forever prevents it from achieving greatness in my eyes. Some ideas seem brilliant but then, in execution, don’t deliver. I’m sure it worked for some people, and if it works for you, then all the more power to you. However, none of the historical perspective or personality that Flanagan invests in this work compensates for the odd parallelism he strives but fails to attain. In the end, the overall structure of the book distracted me from the story rather than heightening my appreciation of it. I wish it had it been otherwise.

[Odai Al-Saeed · Rating 2 out of 5]

ريتشارد فلاناغان الاسترالي والحائز على جائزة المان بوكر العالمية لعام ٢٠١٤ عن عمله الطريق الضيق لعمق الشمال أصدر رواية الرغبة في العام ٢٠٠٨ وترجمتها دار الجمل ترجمة موفقة في عام ٢٠١٨ ترجمة موفقة
أما عن الرواية التي تتجزأ إلى جزءين يختلفا عن مضمونهما ولكن لهما قطع تقاطع فيه يلتقيان وسوف تنشد الإثارة إلى حد ما عندما تقارب الرواية إنهاء حروفها ...سرد رتيب وشخصية رئيسية للراوي غير جذابة ..إطناب وتمغط للحكايات ...حواورات تتصنع العمق برغم خواءها العمقي...لم ترق لي

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanting follows two interconnected storylines set about twenty-five years apart: that of Mathinna, an Aboriginal girl sent to live with the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines at the settlement of Wybalenna on Flinders Island; and Charles Dickens, the lauded actor and author and friend to Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the ex-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), Sir John Franklin. She asks Dickens to help refute the story that Sir John and his men had resorted to cannibalism in order to survive when their two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, had become stuck in ice in the Arctic.

When Sir John and Lady Jane were sent to replace Sir Arthur as governor (Lady Jane was the brains behind Sir John, the presence), they visit the settlement of Wybalenna, where the Tasmanian Aborigines had been removed to after the War between blacks and white settlers was won by the latter. Separated from their ancestral land, converted to a poorly-understood Christianity and fed typical English food that left them riddled with disease and sickness, the Aborigines are dying quickly. But Mathinna catches the eye of Lady Jane as she dances, barefoot and dressed in animal skins, on the beach. Disguising her desire for a child of her own, Lady Jane adopts the girl as part of a social experiment - to civilise the savage.

In London, Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins write and stage a play based on the fate of the two Arctic ships, The Frozen Deep. After the success it enjoys in Dicken's little theatre in his own home, he puts on larger performances and so needs to hire some "real" actors: a woman and her three daughters. The youngest, Ellen, draws Dickens' eye - but he has spent a lifetime determined to rise above primitive emotions, to be civilised. It is in the guise of the martyred character that he plays on the stage, that he can speak as he feels.

This theme of wanting, of denying yourself - and, with it's links to the idea of civilisation vs. primitivism, holds up our repressed notions for ridicule - runs through both stories and draws them tightly together. Without the title of the novel to draw your attention to it, you could perhaps miss it, as it's not a glaringly obvious theme. Subtly told and subtly played, Flanagan makes you work a bit. At times, with its almost ironic, deeply narrative voice, it reads too much like a documentary: the reader knows more than the characters, and there is at once a strange juxtaposition between sympathetic (but, in their honesty, rarely likeable) characters becoming very real to you, and this positing of time and place and history. Rather than "pretend" to resurrect the past as if the present didn't exist, as most historical fiction is written (determined to avoid present knowledge, for instance), Wanting is very much aware of where it all went, of consequence and the bigger picture. There's something deeply nostalgic about this style of historical fiction, this way of conjuring ghosts - for they are ghosts, now; that comes across strongly. This quality only makes the story that much more heartfelt and searing.

The history of the Tasmanian Aborigines isn't well known outside of Australia - outside of Tasmania, even. One of my favourite books of all time, English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, did an amazing job of educating me about it. I knew, from my own education in Tasmanian schools, that the white colonial settlers pretty much massacred them all. Much like they had a bounty on the thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), they had a bounty on aborigines. The Black War - the war between the settlers and the aborigines - killed off even more. But it was their removal to Flinders Island, an island in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and the mainland, that finished them off. There are no "pure blood" Tasmanian aborigines left; haven't been for a long time. But there are many many people with aboriginal blood - and you'd never even know it. The ghosts live on; they have the last laugh.

There's something deeply magical and mystical and quietly grieving about my home state. I've always felt that it's holding back, that it's just tolerating our presence, waiting to welcome back it's true people, the people who really lived there and understood it. I've always loved it, from the dry yellow grass of the grazing land to the wild and impenetrable forests; the craggy, slumbering mountains and crystal-clear water trickling downs their sides from snowmelt; the pretty remains of English colonialism - the deciduous trees, the plentiful flowers, the bees and fruit trees and green green grass. The dry drought-plagued east coast, the rainforests of the west coast, the alpine interior, the windswept north-east where wombats graze and Tasmanian devils try to find food on the beach after the tide's gone out. The rabbits and gorse, plagues both, that the English brought with them; the ruins of Port Arthur and Sarah Island and how the stones echo with ghosts... There's more than one reason why Tassie beckons to so many artists. Richard Flanagan is one of the only contemporary authors to actually write about it. Did you know that Tasmania has the cleanest air in the world? Did you know that government and the logging industry (which is HUGE) are doing their damnedest to cut down all the old-growth forests, which has devastating effects on the native wildlife as well as rainfall, erosion, bushfires etc. Did you know that the logging industry used poisoned vegetables to kill possums and other animals, so they wouldn't make new homes in their plantations? In view of a lack of evidence, it's my belief that their use of a banned poisonous substance, 1080, as well as the toxins the logging industry is polluting our waterways with, has led to the Devil facial tumour disease that could make the Tasmanian Devil extinct in a few years.

No sadder than the fate of our beautiful island is the fate of the aborigines, displayed in all its gruesomeness in Wanting. In comparison, Dickens' story could not possibly touch me in the same way or as deeply. There were a few times where I was irritated that this other story was detracting from the story of Mathinna - but it doesn't, it gives broader context and understanding of the way people thought "back then" - not so different from how they think today, really. Mathinna's story is all the more tragic for this other story. Actually, it made me glad to have The Terror by Dan Simmons on my shelf, ready to read, because the true story is touched upon here. I'm also interested in reading Drood (by the same author, about Charles Dickens), at some point. But it was Mathinna's story that felt almost personal.

By the way, I have been to Flinders Island. I was perhaps eleven, twelve. My parents had made money off the farm for the first time in my life - their best crop of opium poppies (Tasmania is one of the only places in the world where it is legal - though highly regulated and controlled - to grow opium poppies, which are used, of course, for medicine - morphine, especially) - and we had our first-ever family holiday to a new place: Flinders Island, for five days. We got there by a very small plane that didn't have a real floor: a tin bucket in the sky. Flinders Island is beautiful. There are secret beaches on that island like you've never seen: the sand is covered with tiny, brilliantly coloured little cone-shaped shells; you can pan for diamonds, and eat mutton-bird. The cars are all rusty, from the sea-salty air. I'd love to revisit one day.

[Odette · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a love/hate relationship with this beautifully written book. Though, after thinking about it, I am liking it much more. I approached it as historical fiction, and got distracted thinking what is fact or fiction, and also by the life of Dickens. Dora's death had similar impacts on Dickens as Willie on Lincoln. Instead should have just gone along for the ride, as I did when I recently read Lincoln in the Bardo and enjoy the experience of Wanting as great literary fiction.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the Death of Children

This extraordinary novel is framed by the death of two children. Near the beginning, in 1851, Charles Dickens' ninth and youngest child Dora dies while her father is speaking on behalf of a theatrical charity. A few pages later there is reference to the death of another child, an aboriginal girl in distant Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) called Mathinna. The book proceeds in alternating chapters in two converging time periods, moving on from Dora's death and forward to Mathinna's.

The odd-numbered chapters begin in 1838, with the visit of the Vice-Regent, Sir John Franklin, to an island colony where the few survivors of the wholesale slaughter of aborigines in the earlier part of the century have been sequestered, many dying from unexplained diseases. His wife is charmed by the dancing of Mathinna, the seven-year-old daughter of the aborigine king, and decides to have her brought up as a European lady, thus cloaking her sorrow at not being able to bear children herself in the guise of a scientific and educational experiment. Mathinna's life over the next ten years traces an extraordinary parabola; she is a delightful creation, and the story of how she is alternatively feted and abused makes devastating reading.

The connection with the life of Charles Dickens is admittedly slim. By 1851, Sir John Franklin, the former Tasmanian Vice-Regent, has disappeared on an arctic expedition and is presumed dead. His widow enlists Dickens' help in clearing his name from charges of cannibalism. As a result, Dickens becomes interested in polar exploration and, with the help of Wilkie Collins, stages a play with an arctic setting, acting the leading role himself to enormous acclaim. In the course of rehearsals, he falls under the spell of a very young actress, somehow resisting his desire for her even as his own marriage is falling apart. The theme of desire and the mastery of desire is one thing that connects the two parts of the book, as is the relationship between public achievements and private passions. But the thematic connections are not always easy to follow. My experience was akin to reading two historical novels at the same time, enraged by one and intrigued by the other, but treasuring the time spent with either.

For a fuller account of the Tasmanian massacres, I would recommend Matthew Kneale's novel English Passengers, which also uses a multi-threaded technique. Flanagan's focus is personal rather than epic, taking the historical record (for most of these characters really existed) back to the small acts of concupiscence, misplaced rectitude, or sheer stupidity that lay behind it. His writing is exquisite, as in this description of Mathinna dancing in the streets: "part native jig and something of a toff's dance, half-hyena and fully a princess, queer, lost, belonging and not belonging." Or his farewell to Dickens, which goes further than anything to tie the two parts together: "And he, the man who had spent a life believing that giving in to desire was the mark of a savage, realized he could no longer deny wanting." Or the transcendent coda of the book in which the author, surely following the lead of Auden's great poem on The Fall of Icarus, places the whole tragedy as but one small incident in a vast landscape of simple everyday beauty.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Wow” seems insufficient for a book that engaged, entranced and astonished me. Suffice to say I’ve just discovered a new author who will definitely be explored.

WANTING falls under the category that is now known as “faction” – fiction based on actual events. Three stories are interwoven: Sir John Franklin – the polar explorer who disappeared while attempting to find the Northwest Passage and his wife Lady Jane, in flashbacks to when they governed the penal colony of what is now Tasmania. Charles Dickens, who practically invented Christmas, the author – and actor – extraordinaire. And finally Mathinna, an enticing aboriginal girl, who is adopted by the Franklins in an attempt to “civilize” her.

However, it would be a mistake to focus on the veracity of what is divulged about any of these real-life personages. In an author’s note, Mr. Flanagan states that only the barest details are known about Mathinna’s life and some of his more salacious additions are mere speculation.

No, this is not an historical book, but instead, one that fulfills what its title is about: wanting. In a multitude of ways, it is a reckoning of “how we say no to love.” Lady Jane seems cold and calculating but crack the veneer and we view her misguided and horribly misplaced yearning to mother the young orphan girl. Middle-aged Charles Dickens – trapped in a stifling marriage – yearns to find love again and does so with the young actress Ellen Ternan, who indeed fulfilled that role in real life. And Mathinna? All she wants is to feel the earth under her bare toes and go back to an authentic time.

The “wanting” takes a more universal scope as Mr. Flanagan also addresses the macrocosm: the connection between colony and home territory (Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania used to be called). In this, the dominant power to subjugate and civilize; the home territory’s people simply want to “come home.” It is ultimately about connection. As Dickens stages a play called The Frozen Deep – an astounding success in real life – about the Arctic explorer Franklin’s supposed death, he understands that the play is truly about his own life entrapment. “We have in our lives only a few good moments,” Dickens says to Ellen Ternan. “A moment of joy and wonder with another. Some might say beauty or transcendence.”

Often heartbreaking – Mathinna’s descent, while likely not historically accurate, will create tears in even the staunchest reader – this novel is incredibly crafted. Written lyrically, with brio and its own sense of transcendence, this meditation on desire can best be summed up by Dickens himself “He a man who has spent a life believing that giving in to desire was the mark of a savage, realized he could no longer deny wanting.” Nor, it appears, can any of us.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanting is the fifth novel by award-winning Australian author, Richard Flanagan. In 1841, Mathinna, an orphaned young Aboriginal girl, one of the remaining Van Diemen’s Land indigenous who were kept on Flinders Island, was plucked from the “care” of George Augustus Robinson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, to become the subject of an experiment in civilisation of the savage, conducted by the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin.

Mathinna loved the red silk dress she was given, but hated wearing shoes. She wanted to learn to write because she knew there was magic in it. “Dear Father, I am a good little girl. I do love my father. ……come and see mee my father. ……I have got sore feet and shoes and stockings and I am very glad……..Please sir come back from the hunt. I am here yrs daughter MATHINNA”. But when her (dead) father failed to come to her after several letters, her passion for writing faded. “And when she discovered her letters stashed in a pale wooden box….she felt not the pain of deceit for which she had no template, but the melancholy of disillusionment”.

In tandem with Mathinna’s story, Flanagan relates incidents in the life of Charles Dickens, some twenty years later. The tenuous link between the two narratives is this: when Sir John Franklin is missing in the Arctic on his search for the North West Passage, Lady Jane asks Dickens to help refute allegations of cannibalism made by explorer, Dr John Rae. Dickens also writes and stars in a play about Franklin’s lost expedition, during which he meets Ellen Ternan, the woman for whom he leaves his wife.

Flanagan’s interpretation of Mathinna’s life is certainly interesting: his extensive research into the lifestyle and common practices in the colony in the mid-nineteenth century is apparent, and he portrays very powerfully the mindset that led to the virtual extermination of the native population. While the Dickens narrative does have interesting aspects, it is so far removed from the Tasmanian story as to seem somewhat irrelevant, more of an interruption than an enhancement.

Flanagan states in his Author’s Note that “The stories of Mathinna and Dickens, with their odd but undeniable connection, suggested to me a meditation on desire-the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs. That, and not history, is the true subject of Wanting”. Perhaps this statement would be better placed in a preface so that readers do not find themselves distracted wondering about the relevance of the Dickens narrative. Excellent prose make this, nonetheless, a powerful read.

[Karolina Sosnowska · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Magdalena · Rating 5 out of 5]

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, time is as much a shifting illusion as the notion of ‘mastering passion', or the difference between “savage” and “civilised”, the novel opens in 1839. It’s the end of the war between the Van Diemonian (Tasmanian) tribes, and the “Empire”. The remaining tribe 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 that 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 train 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, the novel 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:

She held her face in her hands, as if she were unsure that both it and she were still there, and looked skywards. Through the cracks between her fingers a silver light fell. (222)


Though the villains and victims are fairly clear, with outrage towards the obvious villains never far from the surface, it is Flanagan’s great art that the reader both understands and feels the pain of Dickens, Sir John, the Protector, and Lady Jane:

She wished to rush down to the filthy courtyard, grab Mathinna and steal the frightened child away from all this love and pity, this universal understanding that it was necessary that she suffer so. She wished to wash and soothe her, to whisper that it was all right, over and over, that she was safe now, to kiss the soft shells of her ears, hold her close, feed her warm soup and bread. (195)


The way in which Flanagan takes the private tragedy – the perversion of wanting--and turns it into public history, is as clever and thought provoking as the way in which he references the work of Dickens: Little Dorrit and Great Expectations in particular, in the context of his story. There are other texts – some fictive and some historical that this book references – these things are fact, but beneath that is the pain and hunger that gave rise to those references. The real story lies beneath the facts – the 'wanting' submerged in the hardened ice of time:

And at the pleasant thought of absconding from adulthood, of returning to an implacable solitude as if to the womb, to an inevitable oblivion that by the strangest alchemy of a nation’s dreaming would inexorably become celebrity and history, he smiled again and called for his glass once more to be filled, all the while trying to halt his hand from trembling.(184)


As with Gould’s Book of Fish, Wanting undermines history, recreating it in a magical realism form that tells a greater truth. Like Adrienne Eberhart’s Jane, Lady Franklin, what drives the story is not what happened but what was felt. Unlike Eberhart’s Lady Franklin, Flanagan’s heroine is as guilty as she is tragic. She destroys what she loves by denying herself. This is a powerful novel which shows Flanagan at the height of his considerable literary powers. Long after the story has faded, the reader will be left remembering Mathinna’s pain, the Franklins’ longing and guilt (and maybe our own too), and Dickens’ transformation.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘We have in our lives only a few moments.’

This novel, set in the 19th century, contains separate but connected stories involving a number of historical figures and events. These include Sir John Franklin, Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania); his wife Lady Jane Franklin, George Augustus Robinson (Chief Protector of Aborigines), Mathinna, an aboriginal girl adopted by the Franklins, and the novelists Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

A policy of removal of Van Diemonian aborigines has led to their near extinction. On a visit to Flinders Island, where Mr Robinson has established a settlement for aborigines, the Franklins are captivated by Mathinna. Lady Jane Franklin has no children of her own, and decides: ‘To raise one individual with every advantage of class and rank would be an experiment of the soul worth making, both for science and for God.’

Sir John and Lady Jane each become obsessed with Mathinna but she is unable to meet their idealistic needs and each, in their own way, abandon her.

Years later in England, Lady Franklin seeks the support of Charles Dickens. Sir John’s expedition to discover the North West Passage has vanished, and rumours of cannibalism are spreading. Dickens defends Sir John Franklin through ‘Household Words’ and Collins writes ‘The Frozen Deep’, a play inspired by Dicken’s writing.

The Franklin’s obsession with Mathinna, and Dickens’s obsession with ‘The Frozen Deep’ are each powerfully written. I found the story of Mathinna sadder than the story of Sir John’s lost expedition. In my reading, Mathinna had fewer choices available to her once abandoned by the Franklins.

This is a beautifully told story made more interesting, perhaps, by its setting. The history it embraces is fascinating. This is a story about the tragic consequences of desire and ambition writ
large on a global canvas.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pieces of this strange novel take place at the antipodes: Britain and Tasmania. On one hand, there is the Tasmanian Aborigine girl Mathinna with her oddly winning ways, being pursued by the childless wife of Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer. On the other is Charles Dickens, giving up on her wife Catherine, with whom he had ten children, and taking up with the fetching young actress Ellen Ternan.

I had read Richard Flanagan's great novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North a couple months ago. Wanting: A Novel is about desire and its almost inevitable frustration. (Hmm, so was Narrow Road, come to think of it.) Toward the end, Flanagan looks at the years remaining to Dickens:

That in the thirteen years of life left to him, he would be faithful to Ellen Ternan, but that theirs would be a hidden and cruel relationship. That his writing and his life would change irrevocably. That things broken would never be fixed. That even their dead baby would remain a secret. That the things he desired would become ever more chimerical, that movement and love would frighten him more and more, until he could not sit on a train without trembling. He was smelling [Ellen], hot, musty, moist.

The book's central character, however, is Mathinna. What is it that she wanted? Probably to be left alone. For her entire short life, until her squalid death, Mathinna attracts the sacred and profane desires of both whites and natives, who think they know what they want, but don't.

On the basis of the two books I have now read by him, Flanagan is becoming one of my favorite living authors.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of a girl subjected to a deadly social experiment more than century ago has haunted the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan for decades. As a young man, he was looking at some early-19th-century paintings at the Hobart Museum, when he spotted a watercolor of a child in a pretty red dress. The curator explained that she was Mathinna, an aboriginal child taken in by the renowned Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin in the 1830s while he was lieutenant governor of Tasmania, then called Van Diemen's Land. That strange biographical fact was tantalizing enough, but then the curator removed the oval frame from the portrait to show how it cut Mathinna off at the ankles, hiding her bare black feet. From that carefully cropped portrait, pregnant with suggestions of charity, repression and racism, Flanagan has now spun a tragic story that connects the lives of the 19th century's most expendable people with such luminaries as Sir John and Charles Dickens.

"Wanting" is a smaller novel than “Gould's Book of Fish," Flanagan's masterpiece inspired by Tasmanian history, but its geographical scope is broader as it repeatedly jumps far from that mysterious island to events in England and even the Arctic. In each of these diverse but oddly related settings, Flanagan charts the wreckage done by people convinced that repressing their desires -- and others' -- is the key to civilization.

The book begins on Flinders Island, where Tasmania's aborigines have been forcibly resettled, with disastrous results. Inexplicably -- to those in charge -- these native people have not welcomed the invaders as liberators but have resisted all the civilizing improvements pressed upon them, which include a host of infectious diseases that are finishing off what a program of genocide began. As usual, Flanagan is brilliant at re-creating this "weird land predating time, with its vulgar rainbow colours, its vile, huge forests and bizarre animals that seemed to have been lost since Adam's exile." Everything here is simultaneously fecund and rotting, such as "a small meadow glistening with so many wet spiders' webs that it seemed veiled in a sticky gossamer."

But the people determined to settle this primeval land live in a state of denial, convinced of their immunity from moral judgment. During a highly staged visit from the mainland, Lt. Gov. Franklin and his strong-willed wife, Lady Jane, take a liking to an orphaned 7-year-old girl and decide to use her in their own Pygmalion experiment. "If we shine the Divine light on lost souls," Sir John announces, "then they can be no less than we. But first they must be taken out of the darkness and its barbarous influence."

The bitter irony here is pretty safe nowadays, efforts to bring the light of civilization to the darker people of the world having gone somewhat out of style (see: Operation Iraqi Freedom). But what keeps the novel's satire from sounding shrill is Flanagan's sensitivity to the conflicted conscience of Lady Jane and others involved in this "rigid programme of improvement." Flanagan portrays her as a woman of ferocious determination and relentless loneliness, a figure in many ways more interesting than her famous husband, who "gave no more appearance of any active intelligence than a well-tended pumpkin." Terrified of feelings she can't bear to acknowledge, she squelches every atom of affection, with ruinous results for little Mathinna.

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. Lady Jane, now widowed, has dedicated her life to defending her late husband's reputation from reports that he and his crew failed to discover the Northwest Passage and resorted to cannibalism before expiring in a manner unbecoming to British gentlemen. Determined to raise her husband above such ignoble rumors, Lady Jane enlists the help of the age's most popular writer, Charles Dickens, who not only defends Franklin's incorruptible British spirit but goes on to write and star in a sensationally popular play about the expedition!

The broad outlines of this bizarre story are historically true, though Flanagan points out in an author's note that his novel "is not a history, nor should it be read as one." But, actually, "Wanting" could profit from a little more factual exposition. Whereas Flanagan's earlier novels described the settlement of Tasmania with spellbinding effect, the fragments of that history presented in "Wanting" presume a familiarity with his home country that few readers abroad will possess. Particularly in the early sections, the effect can be as confounding as it is dazzling.

But persist and you'll quickly be drawn into the variations of sadness and yearning that connect these famous figures, rendering them all the more familiar and tragic. Lady Jane, with her deadly cultural chauvinism, seems monstrous until her armor cracks and we see the desperate longing beneath. Dickens -- that patron saint of domestic life, the man who practically invented Christmas -- wanders the streets late at night, crippled by grief over his daughter's death and baffled by the unhappiness of his marriage. "His soul was corroding," Flanagan writes, as though channeling the Victorian novelist himself. "Only in his work did Dickens truly feel that he became himself. . . . All he could do was try to steady himself by returning to work, to some new project in which he might once more bury himself alive." As he produces his play about Franklin's demise, he comes to see the Arctic expedition as a metaphor for his own trapped existence. "For twenty years," Dickens thinks, "had not his marriage been a Northwest Passage, mythical, unknowable, undiscoverable, an iced-up channel to love, always before him and yet through which no passageway was possible." And yet he remains convinced that "the mark of wisdom and civilization was the capacity to conquer desire, to deny it and crush it."

While the grim results of that philosophy play out in Dickens's loveless life, its geopolitical effects ravage a small band of natives on the other side of the world. Like everything in "Wanting," it's a harrowing reckoning of "the way we say no to love."

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[Nandes · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,25/5

A la superfície, una història de racisme, d'imperialisme i barbàrie, de fets històrics memorables en molts sentits... amb una picada d'ullet ben crua a determinats personatges històrics.

Al fons, un relat de la il•limitada perversió de la ment humana, de negació de les emocions i de patiment silenciós... un retrat de la incapacitat de l'espècie humana per trobar un equilibri entre la raó i el desig.

Gran Flanagan, altre cop. Gràcies Raig Verd.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You can have whatever you want, only you discover there is always a price. The question is -- can you pay?"

So writes Charles Dickens in one of his notebooks, reflecting the main theme of this novel -- human desires and the consequences of acting on or denying them.

Wanting is set during two different time periods and in two different countries, with two separate narratives. The link from the past to the novel's present is Lady Jane Franklin, wife of Sir John Franklin, who served as Governor of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and then later died while on the ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition. Throughout this novel there is a particular recurring theme, that of "wanting," and disciplining the heart -- and the question often revisited is this one: what is it that constitutes being a "savage?" According to Dickens, in a conversation with Lady Jane, the distance between savagery and civilization is "the extent we advance from desire to reason," keeping our passions and basic human natures in check. The question first arises between Dickens and Lady Jane as she reads in the London Illustrated that according to a group of Eskimos that spoke to explorer/surveyor John Rae, some members of the Franklin Expedition had resorted to cannibalism. Seeking Dickens' help to uphold and defend her husband's honor, Lady Jane remarks that she knew some "similar savages," when she was in Van Diemen's Land.

While in Tasmania (1836-1843) Lady Jane, pompous and determined to bring British values and other rather snobbish accoutrements with her, decides to embark on a "scientific experiment," and adopts a young Aboriginal girl Mathinna. It is a time in which the indigenous peoples are being hunted down and taken off of their land to make way for their colonizers, and Mathinna is living with others under the shelter of Reverend George Augustus Robinson, known as "the protector." Lady Jane cannot have children of her own; she decides that it is, after all, the age of reason, and decides that it would be a great opportunity to try to take a "savage" under her wing and turn her into a proper Englishwoman. The narrative goes back and forth in time between the Franklins' stay in Tasmania and an episode in the life of Dickens, when he comes to terms with his growing dissatisfaction with his marriage, the production of the play "The Frozen Deep," and ultimately meeting Ellen Ternan.

Not to be read as a novel of history (according to the author), Wanting leaves the reader thinking about the effects of desire. Is it even possible for human beings to "advance from desire to reason?" What price are people willing to pay for what they want? On the other side of the coin, the author also examines the denial of one's desire and the often-devastating consequences it can produce.

There is a lot going on in this book and it is often difficult to read because of the subject matter in some parts. Be warned: some scenes are very sad, some scenes will make you angry, and some will be simply heartbreaking. Yet at the same time, it's really quite well written, and the author has no problem maintaining his main themes throughout the novel. I'm not exactly certain why the author chose to use Dickens as a character, unless it was so he could make use of the imagery and themes of "The Frozen Deep" and what it has to say about being "savage" vs. being civil. I was so caught up in the story of the Franklins, Mathinna and the treatment of the aboriginal peoples that it was almost a shock to get back to England when the narrative would change. That's not to say that Dickens' story was not well told; it was just that the changes interrupted the reading flow -- and the link is a bit tenuous.

Overall, the novel was a good one, a story I thoroughly enjoyed reading, and I'm happy to add it to Gould's Book of Fish on my home library shelf.

[Marguerite Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a literary exercise, this was an excellent book. As a novel, for me, it just didn't quite work.

There are two stories set about twenty years apart. In the first, in Van Diemen's Land, the British-run penal colony, John Franklyn and his wife have taken over the governorship and 'adopted' a native girl. The plan is to convert her from savage to a 'true' English woman, to demonstrate to the world the 'superiority' of Englishness, and to 'prove' that it can triumph over even what they perceived to be the most base, the most vicious and amoral instincts with which the girl was imbibed simply by virtue of her birth.

In the second story, we find Charles Dickens at a crossroads. He's fallen out of love with Catherine, his wife, he's lost Dora, his youngest child, and his melancholia has driven him out onto the London streets, to question the whole ethos of family, hearth and home that he has essentially created. Enter Jane Franklyn, whose husband John has perished in a bid to find the North West Passage, and has been accused of resorting to cannibalism. Jane, appalled at this very savage and un-English accusation, which undermines the noble memory she's worked so hard to create of her husband, wants Dickens, through his writing, to 'prove' that there is no way Franklyn would have allowed himself or his crew to commit such a foul crime.

At this point in the story of course, we don't know what happened to the Franklyn's experiment with their native adopted child, but the parallels are clearly drawn. Frankly and Dickens both feel themselves trapped, past their prime, and are seeking to reclaim their earlier fame. Both feel that their wives are dragging them down. Both are attracted to the youth, the freshness, the tabula rasa of a young girl - at this point Franklyn is obsessed with his adopted daughter, and Dickens has just met Ellen Ternan, the 18 year old actress with whom he had an affaire that lasted the rest of his life (and if you want to know more about this, do read Claire Tomalin's fabulous biography of Ellen). Dickens's play about Franklyn takes over his life, and as he writes and acts in it, the concept of the noble savage, of Englishness, of man's carnal appetites when the bonds of civilisation are removed, take over him too. As his play begins to re-establish Franklyn, we see, in Franklyn's previous life, that not only is his wife's experiment with the native child fading, but that rather than have her 'tamed', she is in fact going a long way to un-tame them.

So, as I said, this is a fascinating literary study. I love the use of two so famous historical characters, the probing into the darkness of their minds and the speculation as to their motivation. I loved the parallels in the stories. But...

The problem is, there was no real story. In a literary novel, there maybe doesn't have to be - in my university years, I'd probably have argued strongly for this to be the case. But I don't think so now. So okay, it was a character study. Yes, it was, but it left me wanting something more out of it. There weren't any conclusions. Don't get me wrong. This was brilliantly written. The prose in places left me in complete awe. It was a fascinating subject matter, and it asked some really interesting questions. But I felt, on the whole, that the novel didn't reach a destination. I felt, ultimately, frustrated.

[Ellen IJzerman (Prowisorio) · Rating 4 out of 5]

De titel van Richard Flanagan's vijfde fictieboek, geeft precies weer waar het boek over gaat: Verlangen. Via een heel dun draadje knoopt Flanagan de lotgevallen van Charles Dickens vast aan die van Mathinna, een Australische 'wilde'. De verbindende factor is Lady Jane, die Charles Dickens vraagt om een storend verhaal over haar man, Sir John Franklin, recht te zetten. Dickens doet dat uit volle overtuiging. Deze ervaring leidt er uiteindelijk toe dat hij zijn vriend Wilkie Collins helpt bij het schrijven van The frozen deep, waarin Dickens zelf de hoofdrol op zich neemt.

Aan de andere kant van de aardbol, jaren eerder, heeft Lady Jane een jong Aboriginal meisje onder haar hoede genomen. Sir John is, na enkele succesvolle poolexpedities, tot gouverneur benoemd van Tasmanië. Bij aankomst maken ze kennis met Mathinna. Het kind maakt zo'n indruk op Lady Jane, zelf kinderloos, dat ze besluit haar te adopteren. Zij streeft ernaar van deze 'wilde' een beschaafd mens te maken en doet er alles aan om het kind een gedegen, strenge Engelse opvoeding te geven. Als de gebeurtenissen er uiteindelijk toe leiden dat Lady Jane moet kiezen tussen hoofd en hart, kiest ze voor haar hoofd en laat Mathinna achter in Tasmanië.

Tijdens de laatste uitvoering van The frozen deep, waar Lady Jane als toeschouwer bij aanwezig is, raken zowel Charles Dickens in zijn rol van Wardour, als Lady Jane overweldigd door hun emoties. Verlangens spelen echter niet alleen bij Charles Dickens en Lady Jane een bepalende rol in hun leven. Dat geldt ook voor de andere hoofdpersonen. Mathinna, Sir John Franklin en George Robinson 'de beschermer van de Tasmaanse Aboriginals' hebben net zulke diepgaande verlangens. Verlangens die hun leven en het einde daarvan bepalen.

Alle gebeurtenissen hebben plaatsgevonden, hoewel Flanagan in het nawoord vertelt dat hij zich hier en daar enige vrijheid veroorlooft en sommige geruchten als waargebeurd heeft opgenomen. De smerigheid, de gruwelijkheden en het racisme uit die tijd worden door hem onverbloemd weergegeven. Of hij het zo bedoeld heeft of niet, dat is wat er na afloop van het boek de meeste indruk achterlaat: de schandelijke wijze waarop de Aboriginals en Tasmaniërs zijn behandeld, verpersoonlijkt door het leven van Mathinna.

[Aggeliki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Στην Απουσία υπάρχουν δύο παράλληλες ιστορίες με ελάχιστα κοινά σημεία που παλεύουν υπερβολικά να ενωθούν. Ίσως και λόγω των δεκαετιών που τις χωρίζουν χρονικά. Που τελικά δεν έχουν να κάνουν και τόσο με την απουσία (όπως προδιαθέτει ο τίτλος του βιβλίου), όσο με τα θέλω.
Κάθε χαρακτήρας θέλει κι από κάτι. Κυρίως να επιβληθεί σε κάποιο άλλο πρόσωπο. Η λαίδη Φράνκλιν να μεταμορφώσει τη Ματίνα στο κοριτσάκι που έπλασε στο μυαλό της, ο Ντίκενς να οδηγήσει τη ζωή του στην επιτυχία που αναζητά περνώντας μέσα από τα πάθη του, ο Φράνκλιν να ικανοποιήσει τις φιλοδοξίες του ενώ στην πορεία ελκύεται με ανομολόγητο τρόπο από τη Ματίνα, η Ματίνα να μην εξημερωθεί σύμφωνα με τα πρότυπα “των λευκών” ψάχνοντας ταυτόχρονα τρόπους να ταιριάξει στο καινούργιο της περιβάλλον.
Τα θέλω εκπληρώνονται, δεν επιβάλλονται όπως συνήθως θεωρούν όσοι είναι σε θέση ισχύος. Εξ ου και εδώ ως αποτέλεσμα έχουμε το τραγικό τέλος της Ματίνας που ίσως αντιπροσωπεύει την κατάρρευση της επιθυμίας, όσο δυνατή και αν είναι.
Η υπερβολική προσπάθεια να ενωθούν αυτές οι επιμέρους ιστορίες με ξένισε, αν και η καθεμιά ξεχωριστά, παρουσιάζουν ενδιαφέρον. Ίσως αν οι επιθυμίες των ηρώων δεν ήταν τόσο καταστροφικές για τον εαυτό τους και για τους άλλους, να με έκαναν να το συμπαθήσω περισσότερο.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Flanagan paints on two canvases. On one of them, situated in England 1859, Charles Dickens figures as the main character with his circle. On the other, situated in Van Diemensland from 1839 onward (the present Tasmania), the Aboriginal young girl Mathinna becomes an orphan as a result of a struggle in which her father gets killed. The governor Robinson takes care of her, later John Franklin and his wife Jane adopt her, in order to make her a ‘civilised’ person. In the structure of the novel lady Jane serves a the pivot point between the two tableaus. All of the main characters are longing: Dickens, who’s marriage is not a happy one any more, the childless lady Jane is longing for a child, Mathinna is longing for acceptance as an Aboriginal with all her natural and cultural background ánd for the intelligence that could have brought her much further in society. Flanagan, in alternating chapters, colours both very stylish and prominently brings a heavy yet sometimes a sort of floating atmosphere, full of sensitivity, and, I’m afraid full of hardship. You can feel that
You can feel that the truthful representation of history is less important than the emotional value that especially Mathinna brings about in her behavior and her attitude of an intrinsically strong girl. Strong novel. JM

[☕Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ratings:

Writing 5
Story line 4
Characters 5
Emotional impact 5

Overall rating 4.75

[Merilee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent novel set in Tasmania and London involving Charles Dickens and John Franklin, the Antarctic explorer and his wife, Lady Jane.

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

tbh Charles Dickens is really gross

[Bella (Kiki) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wanting, the fifth novel by the Tasmanian author, Richard Flanagan, opens in 1839 as a former London builder, George Augustus Robinson, aka the “Great Conciliator,” aka, the “Protector,” has been sent to clean up the killing fields of Tasmania (Van Dieman’s Land) by resettling the remaining natives, who they refer to as “savages,” first at Wybalenna on remote Flinders Island, and then at Oyster Cove, in the south of mainland Tasmania. As he travels, Robinson notes: “There is not a boat harbour along the whole line of coast but what numbers of the unfortunate natives have been shot; their bones are to be seen strewed on the ground.”

In the camps, Robinson’s charges are “scabby, miserable and often consumptive,” and under his care, they are “dying like flies” despite the fact that he has converted them and protected them, giving them Western clothes, a Western diet, and teaching them Western prayers to pray to a Western god. Robinson puzzles about the reason for the tribes’ decline, all the while knowing he and his Western ways are, at least in part, to blame.

Three of Robinson’s charges are Towterer, or King Romeo, the chieftain of a Tasmanian tribe, his wife Wongerneep, and their daughter, Mathinna, who has been christened Leda. Robinson respects Towterer; he looks on him, not as a “charge,” but as an equal. After Towterer’s death, Mathinna, a mysterious and vibrant child, becomes a part of Robinson’s own group in Tasmania.

From 1836 to 1843, Sir John Franklin, the famed English explorer, was governor of Van Dieman’s Land. Along with the ordinary and routine duties of a governor, Sir John and his wife, Lady Jane, were charged with establishing a semblance of Westernization in Tasmania and with converting the native people, or “savages,” to Christianity. (Franklin is better remembered as the Arctic explorer who died during an 1845 expedition he led to find the Northwest Passage, and whose story, at least what is known of it, is brilliantly fictionalized by Dan Simmons in The Terror.)

In their efforts to bring Christianity to the natives, Sir John, following the wishes of his wife, along with Lady Jane, adopts Mathinna, now seven-years-old. As Sir John puts it, “If we shine the Divine light on lost souls, then they can be no less than we. But first they must be taken out of the darkness and its barbarous influence.”

For Lady Jane, though, adopting Mathinna becomes, first and foremost, “educating Mathinna.” Lady Jane really does love Mathinna, and, after many miscarriages, she longs to be a mother. Her “wanting,” however, which she finds difficult to admit, even to herself, is subsumed into the less emotional, more political, wishes of her husband, and Mathinna is put “on a rigid program of self-improvement” that denies Mathinna the affection Lady Jane craves to give her, for Lady Jane, herself, believes education is the key to turning Mathinna from “savage” to lady.

Several years later, in 1843, just before the Franklins are to depart for England, Lady Jane learns that her husband, for reasons he keeps to himself, has sent Mathinna to an orphanage where she is treated very badly, not like a human being at all. Desiring only to bring her home again, Lady Jane visits Mathinna, wanting “to rush down to the filthy courtyard, grab Mathinna and steal the frightened child away from all this love and pity, this universal understanding that it was necessary that she suffer so. She wished to wash and soothe her, to whisper that it was all right, over and over, that she was safe now, to kiss the soft shells of her ears, hold her close, feed her warm soup and bread.” But, as worries over her family’s social and economic status get in the way, Lady Jane begins to consider her more tender wantings to be those of “her reckless heart,” and she, too, abandons Mathinna, now tragically trapped between two worlds and two cultures.

Life in England doesn’t prove happy for Sir John and Lady Jane, and after Sir John is lost in the Arctic, reports surface, courtesy of Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor, Dr. John Rae, that Sir John and his men had turned to canibalism before succumbing to the horrors of the frozen north. These reports so upset Lady Jane, that in 1854, in an effort to redeem her husband’s tarnished reputation, she contacts none other than the great “patron saint” of family life, Charles Dickens, who, along with Mathinna, becomes one of this book’s main characters. Lady Jane wants Dickens to repudiate Dr. Rae, in “Household Words,” Dickens’ periodical, asserting that a fine, God-fearing Englishman such as Sir John would never allow himself to descend to the depths and depravity of cannibalism no matter how dire the situation. And Dickens agrees, writing: “The convict, the Esquimau, the savage: all are enslaved not by the bone around their brain…but by their passions… . A man like Sir John is liberated from such by his civilized and Christian spirit.”

Dickens, who was in his mid-forties when visited by Lady Jane, was, himself, going through a personal crisis. Though profoundly depressed at the death of his ninth child, Dora, and the failure of his marriage to his long-suffering wife, Catherine, is, perhaps at the height of his literary powers. He’d just completed Hard Times and was about to begin Little Dorritt. “His soul was corroding,” Flanagan writes. “Something was guttering within him, no matter how he fed the flame. He chose to embody merriment in company; he preferred solitude. He spoke here, he spoke there, he spoke everywhere; he felt less and less connection with any of it. Only in his work did Dickens truly feel that he became himself… . All he could do was try to steady himself by returning to work, to some new project in which he might once more bury himself alive.”

The project Dickens chooses to bury himself in is Sir John’s cause, and in 1857, with his friend, the novelist, Wilkie Collins, Dickens wrote and starred in a wildly successful play defending the dead explorer titled The Frozen Deep, a play dedicated to showing that a “proper Englishman” does not give in to his passions like a “savage” does. And, Dickens, himself, comes to see a parallel in his own marriage. “For twenty years,” he thinks, “had not his marriage been a Northwest Passage, mythical, unknowable, undiscoverable, an iced-up channel to love, always before him and yet through which no passageway was possible.” And even though the great writer still firmly believed that “the mark of wisdom and civilization was the capacity to conquer desire, to deny it and crush it,” he, too, is confronted with his own “wanting” in the form of eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan, the woman for whom he abandoned his wife, choosing, instead to live in “secret domesticity” until his death in 1870.

What the two story threads, the one in Tasmania involving Mathinna and Lady Jane, and the one in London involving Dickens and Ellen Ternan have in common is that they both revolve around the issue of wanting. Lady Jane represses her wanting for motherhood, whereas Dickens gives in to his for Ellen, even as he says, “We all have appetites and desires, but only the savage agrees to sate them.” Apparently not. Apparently the “stuffy” Victorians could and did give in to their own desires and wantings on occasion. And that brings us to the dilemma of Wanting: Which is worse, giving in to desire, or keeping it locked inside you? “If you turn away from love,” Lady Jane asks, “did it mean you no longer existed?”

The structure of Wanting is sophisticated and complex and moves back and forth in time from 1839 through the 1840s and the 1850s, from Tasmania to London to Manchester and back to Tasmania. I thought the book flowed seamlessly, and I never felt disoriented as the narrative cut back-and-forth.

Wanting is a powerful, lyrical book, filled with many stunning images and set-pieces. One of the best involves Dickens and Ellen Ternan as Dickens encapsulates the theme of the book as he explains to Ellen that special moments in our lives demand to be remembered:

Then you reach an age, Miss Ternan, and you realize that moment, or, if you are very lucky, a handful of those moments, was your life. That those moments are all, and that they are everything. And yet we persist in thinking that such moments will only have worth if we can make them go on forever. We should live for moments, yet we are so fraught with pursuing everything else, with the future, with the anchors that pull us down, so busy that we sometimes don’t even see the moments for what they are. We leave a sick child to in order to make a speech.

The narrative voice is perfect for a novel set during the Victorian era: It’s controlling and controlled and omniscent. It can enter the mind of any of the characters at any time and give us their innermost thoughts. It’s poetic when describing the unspoiled beauty of Tasmania, that “weird land predating time, with its vulgar rainbow colours, its vile, huge forests and bizarre animals that seemed to have been lost since Adam’s exile.” It’s a place where everything is both fecund and rotting at the same time like the “small meadow glistening with so many wet spiders’ webs that it seemed veiled in a sticky gossamer.”

We understand Sir John, Lady Jane, and Charles Dickens, but Flanagan, I think, keeps us at arm’s length when describing Mathinna. We aren’t privy to many of her thoughts. She remains, in part, a mystery, and this might be as Flanagan wanted. But still, for me, Wanting is Mathinna’s book, and it’s her I remember, in her favorite red dress, dancing barefoot and carefree at the edge of my consciousness the way she danced in her village.

Wanting is a beautiful, intricately patterned, shimmering book. Though it contains tragedy, I didn’t feel it was a tragic story as much as one filled with melancholy and regret. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in recent years.

[TBV (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Leda’ is what the Protector at Wybalenna named the little Aboriginal girl. However, when he discovers his ignorance of the Leda and the Swan myth, he quickly reverts to her birth name, Mathinna. There are several allusions to the myth in this beautiful historical novel.

Lady Franklin, wife of the new Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) who is none other than the intrepid explorer Sir John Franklin, persuades her husband to adopt the cute little girl Mathinna. She makes it her project “To raise the savage child to the level of a civilised Englishwoman.”.

In 1843 John Franklin was recalled to England, and in 1845 he was appointed Commander of the expedition to chart the Northwest Passage. James Fitzjames commanded HMS Erebus whilst Francis Crozier commanded HMS Terror. These men and their crews never returned from that Arctic expedition.

By the mid-eighteen-fifties when Charles Dickens was writing Little Dorrit, he was totally disenchanted with his marriage. He and his wife Catherine had been married since 1836, and had ten children.

So now we have several different elements: a little Aboriginal girl adopted by Lady Franklin in Van Diemen’s Land, a tragedy in the Arctic, and a disgruntled famous author in England. (Incidentally, these are all historical facts and therefore not spoilers.) How on earth are these strands tied together?

When explorer John Rae wrote an article suggesting that Sir John and his colleagues had resorted to cannibalism Lady Franklin was incensed. In the novel this fact is used to tie the strands together by having Lady Franklin appeal to Dickens to write an article refuting such nonsense. (“Well, thought Dickens as he continued to listen solemnly, he would have to eat something to maintain that enormous bulk of his.”) However, Dickens duly writes his article (this is fact, but I know not whether Lady Franklin petitioned him), and he becomes so carried away with the idea of the frozen Arctic that he prompts his friend Wilkie Collins to write a play: ‘The Frozen Deep’, the writing of which Dickens promptly micromanages (fact). As a result of the production of this play (in which Dickens himself was a main actor and received rave reviews) he met and fell in love with Ellen (Nell) Ternan, an eighteen-year-old actress, with whom he had a close relationship for the rest of his life.*

The above is background. The fictional story belongs to the real Mathinna, and I leave that to you to read. It is based on historical facts but the missing bits of information are deftly coloured in. This is an interesting novel about Australia’s past and about the tragic history of the Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land.

Both Dickens and Franklin feel invigorated by the young girls. At a themed party Franklin goes as a black swan. Ah, the Leda connection. Well, we know what happened to Leda… Years later Dickens and some friends, including Nell who is not yet his mistress, see a reproduction of Michelangelo’s ‘Leda and the Swan’. Franklin as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land and as famous explorer has a god-like status; Dickens ditto as the great English author. Both men could be likened to a Zeus. To be fair, the relationship between Dickens and Nell was consensual. “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 he could no longer deny wanting.” we read of Dickens in the novel. This of course touches on other themes such as what is the difference between being civilised or a savage, but let’s stop here.

Leda and the Swan by Michelangelo


Leda and the Swan by Leonardo da Vinci


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*Claire Tomalin wrote a nonfiction book about their relationship, The Invisible Woman, and there is a film of it. She also wrote an excellent biography of Charles Dickens: Charles Dickens: A Life.

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Dickens:
“As clatter, hovels, cries and stench filled his being, he would keep on walking, the filthy dross of the everyday stirring in his alchemist’s head and transforming into the pure gold of his fancy.”
“He was advancing down a narrow tunnel, through the blackness of that overwhelming noise, to a place from where he would never return.”

George Augustus Robinson, Protector of Wybalenna
“Other than that his black brethren kept dying almost daily, it had to be admitted the settlement was satisfactory in every way.”

Lady Franklin
“For Lady Jane, what saved the child from being a child was that she was a savage, and what saved her from being a savage was that she was a child.”

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Australian author Richard Flanagan has won numerous literary awards (too many to mention here), including the prestigious The Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I was impressed by his writing and by his acerbic humour/satire. The characterisation of both historic people and fictional characters is good too. It is also worth pondering the word ‘wanting’ whilst reading this novel.

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This was a serendipitous find: I had just finished reading a book about explorer Alexander Mackenzie (Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage) in which John Franklin is mentioned. As is my wont, I tend to have several books on the go at any time, and reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, I was exactly at the point where Dickens is writing Little Dorrit, and is thoroughly disenchanted with marriage. In fact I had started reading 'Little Dorrit'. And then this novel came along which ties together these topics (if at times a little tenuously).