‘Bass Strait, 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, runs through the grass of a wild island at the edge of the world. Eighteen years later in Manchester, Charles Dickens is a sensation, starring in a play that resembles the frozen landscape of his own inner life.’
The inner flap of Tasmanian Richard Flanagan’s 20008 novel: ‘Wanting’.
In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end, Flanagan (in case we didn’t get it) informs us that his work is ‘a meditation on desire―the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs’. Here Flanagan, uncharacteristically, undersells himself, for while ‘Wanting’ is certainly about this, it is also about much more. We all have thwarted desires and count the cost, but these are, for the large part, private and anonymous. But what are the effects of thwarted desires, or otherwise, of major public figures? Presumably any private cost must also be reckoned in the public sphere. The ramifications are political and historical, and therefore continuing.
In the opening of Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s 1989 novel, ‘Solomon Gursky was Here’, ‘during the record cold spell of 1851’ out of the swirling snows surrounding the mill town of Magog emerges a ‘long, heavily laden sled at the stern of which stands ‘Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip’. The locals gather with a few questions:
‘Where are you from?’
‘The north, my good fellow.’
‘Where… north?’
‘Far.’
Although he never admits it, what also emerges is that Ephraim has somehow escaped from Sir John Franklin’s final disastrous expedition to find the fabled North-West passage. No recorded survivors, but here is an unknown sailor, like most, and it is entirely plausible that this man has made it out, and so Richler has a free hand to chart his subsequent life and that of his descendants.
But let’s say Sir John Franklin himself came out of those mists. If he tells the Magogans who he is, Richler is at once constrained. The subsequent life he invents for Sir John must be conditioned by his known life to date and his status. What has happened to his crew? His boats? And he has a wife, Lady Jane, searching for him etcetera. The hand is not so free, still, there is room.
The general convention for historical fiction is that the protagonists are the sailors, tailors, tinkers, folks like us, who can pretty much do what they like except that, unlike us, they have to live through the impact of known events, mostly caused by historical personages who have to do what they did. These giant shadowy figures are usually floating in the background or make the occasional guest appearance but with their ‘inner life’ being left where it was. There are exceptions: Tolstoy gives us Napoleon in War and Peace as a lucky bumbler, which could hardly have been the case, but suits his agenda.
And Flanagan goes the whole hog in ‘Wanting’, a novel composed almost entirely of historical figures, inner life and all. They have to do what they did, but beyond this, the author does pretty much what he likes. Central to the story are Sir John Franklin, Governor of Tasmania (1837-1843) and his adopted Aboriginal child, Mathinna. But also we have Lady Jane Franklin, who is ingeniously linked, in a parallel story two decades hence, to Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Ellen Ternan and sundry others. All pretty fully realised according to Flanagan’s agenda. Is this credible? Does it matter?
Let’s start with the language, which raises like issues. Flanagan has soaked himself in Dickens and his fellows and the tale is told in an anachronistic pastiche which might have purists tearing their hair out. But for the ‘ordinary’ reader it only matters that what is presented is consistent, so they can forget about the telling and fall into what is being told. And it is consistent, what’s more, it is highly accomplished, reminding me of Peter Carey’s Victorian novels, ‘Jack Maggs’ , ‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’, and others where a completely convincing ‘type’ of English is invented over to suit each story.
For this story the question becomes: being fiction of factual figures, is it credible within itself? Again, purists might demur, but surely it is only fair to grant the novelist his premise and see how it all pans out. As with the language, for the reader it really only matters if it jells, if it works as an artistic whole, and again for this reader, it does triumphantly. Even to the extent of having to accept a central crucial event which, upon any reasonable reflection, would not have occurred.
In all of his novels, Flanagan’s characters are trapped in some vast machine. That machine is usually Western Capitalism, in various guises. In ‘Wanting’ that guise is Colonialism, one of the many dark roots of W.C. The general effect throughout his oeuvre is to foreground the machine rather than the individuals. Flanagan is an ‘issues’ writer. Here the issue is the evil of Colonialism and so he manipulates his characters, inner lives and all, to demonstrate this. In some other of his novels the manipulation feels like him climbing up onto a soapbox and haranguing us directly, but not here. In ‘Wanting’ all the pieces work neatly together without his intervention, including the secondary narrative.
‘Wanting’ is Mathinna’s story, and also Sir John’s, but Mathinna’s story is a truly terrible one, difficult to read, but read it we must, so to help us get to the end, Flanagan offers us periodic relief with the story of Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan. Many writers employ this ‘sonata form’ device, but two that particularly come to mind, and Flanagan cites them so we can assume an influence, are the unlikely bedfellows of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Secondary narratives in these two writers regularly offer both relief and diversion, but of course beyond this they subtly continue and develop the primary narrative. For example, Dickens as a writer was, amongst other things, a crusader against the evils of rampant capitalism, also he performed in a play about Sir John and the arctic, and so on.
Dickens relationship with Ellen is not the same as Sir John’s with Mathinna but does contain similar elements, so while we follow one, we are reflecting on the other. The biggest similarity is one of imbalance of power. Sir John can do with Mathinna whatever he wishes, which he eventually does, because he is the Governor and she is an Aborigine. Likewise Dickens is rich, famous and charismatic and so it is difficult, and imprudent, for Ellen to resist his desires. Interestingly, in stark contrast to Sir John and Mathinna, Flanagan points to a happy ending between the novelist and the actor, despite considerable collateral damage to Dickens’ wife and his relationship with his favourite child.
But with poor abused Mathinna we witness Colonialism at its most pernicious. An indigenous race cruelly persecuted, rounded up and exiled to an unhealthy sanatorium, essentially a prison. Mathinna then plucked from this place as a plaything for Lady Jane gradually becoming an object of desire for Sir John who in a moment of drunken hubris commits an atrocious act (no spoiler, well flagged in advance) which destroys the young girl, whom the couple then abandon to destitution and death.
With the exception of this act, and Sir John’s desire, this lamentable story is well documented and known, in fact most of what occurs in both stories is on the record. But Sir John’s ‘made-up’ relationship with Mathinna is absolutely central to Flanagan’s messages concerning Colonialism, the shocking black heart of his book. Because of this, the power of his conviction, and also of his writing, we accept this relationship as contiguous with the whole. Well I did.
Sir John commits an evil, but he is not an evil man, not a psychopath. He is a weak man in a strong position, himself also a victim of the machine. It is important Flanagan engenders some sympathy for Sir John so we keep that machine in mind. Finally, the only way to escape himself and the machine is in the frozen wastes, where there is nothing: ‘There came to him a sense of his own horror. Cold was crossing his skin, invading his being, fine shards of ice were already webbing his lungs’. A through passage perhaps for the innocent Ephraim, but not for Sir John.
‘Wanting’ is a fine historical novel of past sins and questionable legacies.