Wanting

Product Description Internationally acclaimed and profoundly moving, Richard Flanagan’s Wanting is a stunning tale of colonialism, ambition, and the lusts and longings that make us human. Now in paperback, it links two icons of Western civilization through a legendarily disastrous arctic exploration, and one of the most infamous episodes in human history: the colonization of Tasmania. In 1841, Sir John Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane, move to the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. There Lady Jane falls in love with a lively aboriginal girl, Mathinna, whom she adopts and makes the subject of a grand experiment in civilization—one that will determine whether science, Christianity, and reason can be imposed in the place of savagery, impulse, and desire. A quarter of a century passes. Sir John Franklin disappears in the Arctic 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. As Franklin’s story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own life, Dickens finds a young actress thawing his heart. From Publishers Weekly 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.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist 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. --Michele Leber From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles 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 wa