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Richard Flanagan jumps back and forth between two vaguely connected historical events in his new novel, Wanting. These events don't knit together very well, which creates an odd plotline.
The first event involves the 19th century Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and his wife Lady Jane who govern Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania. They try to raise a young savage girl, named Mathinna, to become a civilized English woman.
The experiment fails due to the inability of the Franklins to control her.
When Sir John is asked to resign his governing post and return to England, the Franklins leave Mathinna behind, and she becomes a deranged homeless girl.
The second event involves the great Charles Dickens producing a play inspired by Sir John's 1845 polar expedition. Dickens learns from the now widowed Lady Jane that her husband's expedition ships, missing for nine years, have been found. All are dead, and there's evidence of cannibalism having taken place.
Inspired by the story, Dickens asks his friend and fellow author Wilkie Collins to write a play based on this tragic expedition. Dickens produces and acts in the play, called The Frozen Deep. The work consumes him while his marriage falls apart.
Flanagan's biggest mistake in plotting and fictionalizing these two historical events is that he fails to ground us with calendar years throughout the story. And so as it moves back and forth between Van Diemen's Land and Victorian London, I floated uncomfortably, wondering and confused about the time span.
Flanagan states in the book's Author's Note that the true subject of his novel is desire – that is, the cost of denying desire and the force of its power in human affairs. He spins this theme with the maternal desire of the childless Lady Jane and the sexual desires of both Sir John and Dickens.
Dickens lusts for an actress and sums up the power of desire in a notebook, writing: "You can have whatever you want, only you discover there is always a price. The question is, can you pay?"
Despite Flanagan's statement, the history generating the fiction is more present than the theme of desire. It is the history and the lyric narrative voice that kept me reading this interesting novel, and they are why I would recommend it, but with caution: be prepared to read without a compass.
Wanting by Richard Flanagan is published by Atlantic Monthly Press. I'm Kassie Rose.
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