IF YOU'VE ever had the chance to follow your heart but hesitated because you know that if you do you could risk everything, you'll know that feelings of want can tear you apart.
In Richard Flanagan's novel, Wanting, are famous characters who suffer this symptom of humanity.
- Wanting, by Richard Flanagan. Knopf Australia, rrp $35
There is Sir John Franklin, the real-life Lieutenant-Governor of Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) from 1837, his wife, Lady Jane, who pays an equally terrible price for denying the love she feels, the great English writer Charles Dickens, who doesn't deny it, and Mathinna, a black girl.
Some are personalities of history, whose inclusion as fictional characters in Wanting is sometimes confounding, but always powerful.
This harrowing tale follows the story of Sir John and Lady Franklin's time in Tasmania and their failed efforts to educate a black child, Sir John's desire for the child, his subsequent demise and allegations he fell to cannibalism and savagery when his ship, Erebus, became stuck in Arctic ice.
Alongside it runs the story of Dickens, contracted by Lady Jane Franklin to defend and disavow the allegations of cannibalism.
And there amid it all is Mathinna, the black child who does not shape her life with reason but is denied all things she wants, things warm and familiar to her such as family, nature, the possum-skin rug and the animals and birds.
The dark finish to this powerful book is painful. As Tasmanian-born resident Flanagan himself says, "it's a book about our terrible need for love and the cost to us when we deny that need".
Enough said. Read it.
