The death of Francie opens up a black hole in the family drawing Anna, Terzo and Tommy into its implacable singularity. The brilliance of Flanagan’s story and the deep power of this novel is in our witnessing of the end of the world. Yet, while Logan Roy is a monster and Francie a saint, the effect in the adult children is exactly the same. In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams it is a matriarch rather than a patriarch slowly, messily and unevenly passing out of the world. Its heart is the tawdry machinations of the infantilised children as they jockey for advantage, trying to win the game of imaginary approval driving sibling rivalry. While Succession, with its ageing mogul patriarch Logan Roy, is loosely based on the Murdoch dynasty, it does not really depend on a media empire at stake. In this respect, Flanagan’s novel resembles Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections or HBO’s Succession. What place? Not Tasmania, but the invisible, traumatic centre of family life - all the failures, evasions, dirty compromises swept under the carpet only to reappear with surprising exactitude each Christmas. In the face of a scarred country, Anna must return home and face the scars of her family.
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