Reviewed by Sandra Hogan

An Aboriginal child, Mathinna, poses for a portrait, barefoot and wearing her favourite red dress. Her adopted father, Sir John Franklin, has the watercolour image framed; the oval frame cuts off the child's bare feet at the ankles. This painful image is the haunting centre of Richard Flanagan's new book Wanting, a symbol of the determination of Australia's eighteenth-century rulers to impose civilisation on its conquered lands and people.

Mathinna, Sir John and his wife Lady Jane, are real historical figures connected through an odd historical quirk with another character in the book, the great Victorian author, Charles Dickens. The setting in Van Diemen’s land and some of the incidents are historical facts. Yet, in media interviews since the publication of Wanting, Flanagan has stressed that this book is not an historical novel. His point seems to be that his intention was not to record history, but to use history to make a point about humanity. In a short afterword to the novel, he explains:

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 (256).

The denial of desire is behind the symbolic amputation of Mathinna’s freedom-loving feet, behind her rape and abandonment by her adopted father, behind the sense of desolation experienced by Charles Dickens in the family life he praised in his books, and behind the fear of the white rulers for their conquered black peoples. And in every instance in the book, desire can not be denied. It always breaks out, with devastating consequences.

Wanting is a sad, vivid book in which Flanagan expresses his very strong feelings about the painfulness and uncertainty of life through powerful, compact prose. This artfully constructed novel, with its variety of astonishing characters and stories, is introduced deftly in short, contrasting chapters, bringing the reader back in small climaxes to the central theme of conflict between reason and wanting. A good deal of craft has gone into this book with its clear, spare writing style and—ironically, given the theme—deep, but controlled emotions.

The story of Mathinna and her adopted family, and the response to her elevation to ‘black princess’ by the pragmatic and racist citizens of Van Diemen’s Land makes fascinating reading, while Dickens’s inner struggles with his soul, his obsession with ice and snow, and his feelings that writing has drained him of the best in life, make less compulsive reading.

Wanting is a passionate indictment of racism and the force of repression that drives it, and it is a champion of love, for people and country. Without love, Lady Jane discovers, we may not exist at all. And it is an expression of soul that connects us with the earth and with other people and with beauty. For Mathinna, and perhaps for some of us, this soul arises through bare feet on the ground.


Wanting
(2008)

by Richard Flanagan
Random House Publishing
ISBN: 9781741666557
256pp AUD$35.00