Wanting /

IN 1854 Lady Jane Franklin, the widow of the polar explorer Sir John Franklin, visited Charles Dickens to ask for a favor. Dickens had just completed his novel "Hard Times" and was about to begin "Little Dorrit"; he was the most celebrated writer in England, at the zenith of his fame and popularity. Lady Jane wanted him to refute a recent article about her husband's disappearance in the Arctic some nine years earlier, which implied that Franklin's crew had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Dickens - outraged at the slur on this hero of the British Empire - published a furious counterattack in his own magazine, Household Words, and it is possibly the strangest and most intemperate piece of journalism he ever wrote: a near-racist tract claiming that it was physically and morally impossible for stalwart, civilized white men to descend to the level of "savages." For Dickens biographers, this episode usually merits a paragraph or a page. But for the novelist Richard Flanagan, the brief contact between Dickens and Lady Jane has provided the catalyst for his fifth work of fiction, "Wanting" - a literary-historical game of six degrees of separation, exploring the shadowy affinities among the various parties involved and the ripple effects of the encounter through real lives and generations. Flanagan was born in Tasmania, where he still lives - and where, as it happens, Sir John Franklin served as governor from 1837 to 1843 (when it was still known as Van Diemen's Land). The meeting between Lady Jane and Dickens thus offers Flanagan a double opportunity: to investigate the brutal history of his homeland and to explore a turning point in the emotional life of one of history's great novelists. He attends to both through the old trick of a cross-cutting narrative. One strand of the story follows Dickens's life between 1854 and 1858. The other follows a young aboriginal girl named Mathinna, who survives the British genocide on Van Diemen's Land and is adopted during Franklin's tenure by the governor and Lady Jane. Mathinna's short unhappy life becomes emblematic of the suffering of Tasmania's aboriginal people and of the nature of 19th-century British colonization, underpinned as it was by a self-serving assortment of sociocultural ideas and moral values. She is taken from Flinders Island, where the few remaining Van Diemen Aborigines were held, and for a brief while becomes the darling of the governor's provincial court. Franklin, in Flanagan's telling, becomes so obsessed with the girl that, one night, finding himself alone with the sleeping child, he rapes her. When Franklin is eventually relieved of his posting and called back to England, he and his wife leave Mathinna behind in a grim Hobart orphanage. Deprivation, misery, drunkenness and the basest prostitution mark her subsequent rapid downfall. Meanwhile, back in London in the 1850s, Dickens is undergoing what we would now recognize as a kind of neurotic midlife crisis. In his mid-40s, unhappy and restless despite his manifest renown and wealth, working unceasingly, realizing that his marriage is to all intents and purposes dead, Dickens embarks on a theatrical project with his friend Wilkie Collins. Together, inspired by Franklin's fate, they write a play about polar exploration called "The Frozen Deep," with Dickens in the starring role. Such is its success that Dickens (who drew amazing gratification and energy from performing) tours the production with professional actors. And actresses - including the 18-year-old Ellen Ternan. Dickens was, shortly thereafter, to abandon his wife for Ternan and, until his death in 1870, to live a secret domestic life with her as his mistress. 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. The authorial tone of voice is controlling and omniscient, as in a Victorian novel. We enter the minds of his key characters at will and learn their most intimate thoughts; ironies and unforeseen historical consequences are alluded to with full wisdom of hindsight. "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: the secret "silences" of Tasmania, as he terms them, and the essential needs that inform all human lives across history and culture and race. There are moments of great power and lyricism in "Wanting," not only in wild Tasmania but also in noisome London. Here Dickens is about to meet Ellen Ternan for the first time: "The working entrance to the Haymarket Theater was a furtive door protruding into a side alley, from which the summer morning heat was raising a chutney of odors. With the toe of a boot, Dickens flicked aside the oyster shells splattered with bird droppings that were piled over the entrance steps." Mid-19th-century London comes alive, as indeed does Dickens himself. Flanagan's portrait of the great author rings true, perfectly catching his demons and his tremendous energies. As its title suggests (and as Flanagan confirms in an author's note), "Wanting" is among other things a meditation on desire. Dickens's and Mathinna's desires - and their denial, self-imposed or enforced - influence their lives in unimaginable ways, for good and for bad. Yet considering its vast ambitions, "Wanting" is also a modestly sized novel, and sometimes one wishes Flanagan had the ease and space of a Victorian three-decker to incorporate the complex narrative and thematic machinery he imposes on himself. He has to compress and summarize in order to fulfill the historical exposition required, and the strain of fitting a quart into a pint pot is occasionally evident: "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." However, the novel illustrates once again - with terrific brio and aplomb - how fictionalizing history and real people can pay great dividends. Unlike the biographer or historian, the novelist is not constrained by documented facts or their frustrating absence, and is free to roam - always keeping authenticity and plausibility in mind - through character and motive, supposition and possibility. In confident, expert hands, fiction can liberate the past and our perception of major (or minor) historical figures in ways that the scholar or journalist must deeply envy. Richard Flanagan is an exemplary case in point. Through his fiction, flat, conformist portraits of individuals become rich and three-dimensional, new witnesses provide fresh testimony about the past, and Tasmania's silences resound with voices. The tale of a Dickensian orphan's downfall intersects with the tale of Dickens himself at midlife. William Boyd's new novel, "Ordinary Thunderstorms," will be published next spring.

Acclaimed Tasmanian author Flanagan (The Unknown Terrorist, 2006) explores the pursuit and denial of desire as it affects individual lives, even history, in his fifth novel. With his native country (then called Van Diemen's Land) as the starting point, he elucidates the Victorian contention that only savages such as the native Aborigines are ruled by their passions. Yet when Sir John Franklin takes governance of the land in 1836, his wife is so taken with Aborigine orphan Mathinna that she adopts the child, intending to make her a proper Englishwoman. Years later in London, Lady Jane Franklin enlists Charles Dickens to write a defense against the charge of cannibalism on her husband's long-missing Arctic expedition. Obsessed with the expedition's story, Dickens writes (in collaboration with Wilkie Collins) and stars in the play The Frozen Deep, during which the writer who trumpeted the joys of family life falls in love with young actress Ellen Ternan and soon divorces his wife. Although the bare bones of this novel are historically accurate, connecting them to focus on desire seems a stretch, but Flanagan's masterful probing of emotion with his vibrant prose helps compensate for problems of plot.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2009 Booklist

Flanagan follows The Unknown Terrorist with an intricate exploration of civility and savagery that hinges on two famous 19th-century Englishmen: Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and Charles Dickens. In 1839 Tasmania, a tribe of Aboriginals are in the Van Diemen's Land penal colony, soon to be governed by Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane. The Franklins adopt a native girl, Mathinna, whom Lady Jane hopes to use as proof that civility lies in all human beings, even savages. Years later, in 1854 London, Lady Jane asks Charles Dickens to help defend her late husband's honor from accusations of cannibalism. Dickens, devastated by his daughter's death from pneumonia, publishes a defense of Franklin's honor, then develops a stage adaptation of Franklin's demise that forces the writer to face his suffering and introduces him to a comely young actress. The interlaced stories focus on conquering the yearning that exists both in the Aboriginals and the noble English gentlemen, and though Flanagan has a tendency to hammer home his ideas, his prose is strong and precise, and the depiction of desire's effects is sublime. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The latest novel from acclaimed Australian author Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish; The Unknown Terrorist) is a meditation on the power of desire to transform lives. In an isolated Australian penal colony in the 1840s, an Aboriginal girl named Mathinna is adopted by the English governor, celebrated Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane. Devastated by her inability to bear a child, Lady Jane longs to coddle Mathinna but instead sets her on a rigid course of "improvement." Their thwarted relationship and Mathinna's subsequent emotional devastation form the aching core of the novel. A decade later, as Sir John and his crew slowly starve to death after an Arctic shipwreck, a London writer named Charles Dickens finds himself haunted by the story of the failed expedition. This obsession becomes The Frozen Deep, a play through which Dickens seeks to redeem his own emptiness. As always, Flanagan's prose is beautifully crafted, at once elegant and astonishing. This is Flanagan's most accessible work to date, and it should draw new fans. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09; for a very different take on Charles Dickens, see Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens, reviewed on p. 96.-Ed.]-Kelsy Peterson, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Adventurous Tasmanian writer Flanagan (The Unknown Terrorist, 2008, etc.) skillfully combines several partially known historical events to create complex and riveting fiction. His fifth novel features two preeminent Victorian figures: beloved novelist Charles Dickens and polar explorer Sir John Franklin, whose search for the fabled "Northwest Passage" to the Arctic ended in failure and death. In this inventive fusion of their separate histories, Dickens accedes to widowed Lady Jane Franklin's appeal that he publish conclusive disproof of allegations that the doomed northern travelers resorted to cannibalism. Reaching back into several characters' past lives, Flanagan vividly depicts the Franklins' experience on the penal colony island of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), where Sir John acts as governor to a largely aboriginal population, and his fastidious wife conceives grand "ideas for projects and ventures and organizations." One such "project" is the childless Lady Jane's determination to adopt and civilize a charming orphaned aboriginal girl, an act of willed kindness demonstrably doomed to failure. In the novel's present day, we observe Dickens eternally hard at work, pulled in far too many directions at once, ever more estranged from his fat, unlovely wife Catherineherself burdened by having borne him ten children. Dickens' obsessive fascination with the tragic story of the Franklin expedition leads him to write a play about it with colleague Wilkie Collins and to star in it himself. The great author's encounter with beautiful young actress Ellen Ternan erodes his belief in his own stoical forbearance; he learns that he, like the Franklins in their insular Southern Pacific paradise, "could no longer deny wanting." Everything dovetails beautifully, if rather too neatly, as the richly imagined multiple narrative arrives at its several sorrowful conclusions. An ingenious, thoughtful and potent demonstration of this assured author's imaginative versatility. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.