At the centre of the novel is a Tasmanian family marked by its own experiences of loss. Francie, the redoubtable matriarch, is well into her eighties. Her husband, Horrie, is dead, having succumbed to early-onset dementia in his fifties. One of her sons, Robbie, is also long gone: he came home from Catholic boarding school at the age of fourteen and hanged himself in the garage. Francie’s three surviving children, now well into middle age, have pursued different paths in life. Anna, the oldest, moved to Sydney and joined the professional class, becoming a partner in an architecture firm. Terzo, the youngest and bossiest, decamped to Queensland and became an archetypal finance-sector spiv. The stuttering Tommy, who bears his own psychological scars from whatever went on at that boarding school, remained in Tasmania to become a ne’er-do-well artist.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is the story of Francie’s death. As her health begins to fail, her children are forced to make all the difficult decisions that the situation demands. Around this inexorably linear narrative, which can arrive at only one possible ending, Flanagan weaves a wide-ranging series of reflections and observations, with Anna as the novel’s centre of consciousness.

Flanagan’s widely admired novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) was a tribute to his late father and the fortitude of those ordinary Australian men who fought, suffered, and died in World War II. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams offers a maternal counterpoint. Its most tender and reverential passages exalt Francie as the embodiment of a certain kind of indomitable, stoic, working-class Catholic woman who accepts her humble domestic role with equanimity, sacrifices her life to the task of nurturing her family, and conducts herself with a mixture of toughness and open-hearted kindness.

There is a current crop of Australian novelists, all men of roughly the same generation, whose work combines leftist politics with a distinct element of social conservatism, the latter arising from a complicated sense of loyalty to some combination of working-class tradition, religion, and family. This is true of Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas, and Tony Birch, despite their very different backgrounds, and it is true of Flanagan. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams characterises Francie’s deprived upbringing as ‘materially poor but spiritually rich’. It strikes a delicate balance between an elegiac sense that admirable notions of decency and sacrifice are vanishing from the world and nostalgia for a regressive ‘cult of women’ that can quite frankly get in the bin. The novel is certainly aware of this delicacy and negotiates it adroitly by focusing on the cultural rupture that Francie’s demise represents. The tensions that arise between her children reflect their altered social positions. Anna becomes conscious that she and Terzo tend to gang up on Tommy, whom they regard with a mixture of condescension and pity. But she also understands on a deeper level that they patronise him because they are shamed by his selflessness and indifference to their materialism.

One of the notable features of the moralism in Flanagan’s recent novels is the attempt to hold on to a pre-established sense of value and meaning. They are concerned with the status of concepts like honour and decency and sacrifice and truth, and whether such concepts can survive onslaughts of nihilism. The prisoners of war in The Narrow Road to the Deep North face the problem of how to maintain their humanity in dehumanising conditions. In First Person (2017), Kif Kehlmann’s attempts to grapple with the brazen dishonesty of the conman Siegfried Heidl induce a kind of epistemological vertigo that starts to scramble his moral instincts.

In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, the destabilising context is cultural. The novel’s jagged riffs on the wretchedness of contemporary life, which extend from the geopolitical (‘brexitrump climatecoal’) to the institutional (Terzo’s dodgy mates in finance) to the trivial (pretentious restaurants get a bit of a serve), are part of an encompassing view that society has been overtaken and remade by a terminal superficiality. It suggests that we are distracting ourselves to death. The chief culprit is, of course, the internet. Anna tries to escape the stress of her situation by compulsively reaching for her phone and doomscrolling through horrific images of burning landscapes and dead animals, which only makes her feel even more stressed. Later in the novel she looks up from her phone, sees a tram full of people all fixated on their screens, and thinks: ‘sensation by sensation, emotion by emotion, thought by thought, fear on fear, untruth on untruth, feeling by feeling – they were themselves being slowly rewritten into a wholly new kind of human being’.

This is not exactly an original observation, though it is true enough. What concerns Flanagan is not simply the cultural diagnosis but the alienated state of being that this new reality is apt to generate. Running through The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a preoccupation with the way that the apparent need to escape from an essential reality into an inessential realm generates a cycle of isolation, passivity, and disempowerment. This is filtered through Anna’s middle-aged, middle-class anxieties about the state of her personal relationships and her own inability to communicate in direct and meaningful ways. At one point in the novel, she discovers that her adult son is stealing from her. She can’t bring herself to talk to him about it. Yet the real fear at the heart of the novel is not that people are unable to see the problems they face, or that they lack the ability to confront them. It is that, as Anna realises with horror, ‘they did not want to see’.

The most peculiar aspect of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a fanciful conceit, pitched somewhere between Gogol and Dr Seuss’s Wacky Wednesday. As the novel unfolds, Anna realises that parts of her body are disappearing. She loses a finger, a knee, her left breast, her whole hand. There is no pain, no wound; they simply vanish. She becomes aware of other losses. Her doctor’s ear is missing. Her uncommunicative son Gus, who spends most of his time in his bedroom disappearing into the infinitude of cyberspace, loses his nose and an eye. No one else seems to notice these absences.

This surreal twist functions as a unifying metaphor for many of the novel’s themes. It is analogous to the environmental devastation that contextualises the narrative. It literalises Anna’s uneasy sense that the world around her is falling apart, reinforcing the idea that there is something deeply perverse about the way people will often refuse to acknowledge the most obvious and important things. The concept draws a parallel between Anna’s anxieties and the wasting away of Francie’s octogenarian body. Perhaps most importantly, it links the daughter’s increasing sense of disorientation to the virtual reality of the online world and the vivid ‘waking dreams’ her mother experiences as she declines, suggesting that there is an unreality about what we take for reality.

But if this excursion into magic realism makes thematic sense, it is less effective in a dramatic sense. On the level of narrative, nothing especially consequential follows from these inexplicable physical disappearances. They rise to no heights of pathos or comedy. As such, they don’t generate the Kafkan disquiet that is perhaps intended. They come to seem neither grotesque nor uncanny, just a bit weird.

This is a minor flaw in a novel that certainly does not lack for pathos or intelligence. The creative energy of Flanagan’s writing is evident throughout. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is one of those books that returns obsessively to certain words, considers them from different angles and in different contexts, exposes their depths and complexities, the way that Shakespeare dismantles the concepts of ‘honour’ in Julius Caesar and ‘honesty’ in Othello, or the way he repeats that despairing word ‘nothing’ in King Lear. Flanagan has a fair crack at bludgeoning the nihilism out of ‘nothing’, and he genuflects before ‘beauty’, but the word he repeats most often is ‘love’. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is an essay on the metaphysics of love, which it depicts not in any platitudinous sense as some kind of hippie panacea but as a harrowing and elusive concept. It is a novel alert to the acute difficulty of expressing love in word and deed. It considers the ways in which love can be perverted and inverted. It seeks to affirm the reality of love, even as it is disturbed by the possibility that the conditions of contemporary life have become so estranging and degrading that we don’t know really what it means anymore.

In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Flanagan writes, somewhat sententiously, that a ‘great book compels you to reread your own soul’. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams asks in a more hesitant and winning spirit: ‘Shouldn’t stories work towards something that we can’t get anywhere else?’ The novel is true to its word. It works towards an elusive ‘something’ that resists naming, but that finds its symbolic expression near the end of the novel in the form of the endangered orange-bellied parrot. Flanagan has always been part didact, part sentimentalist. In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, these two sides of his writing are integrated as effectively as they have ever been. Francie’s death, when it comes, is a moving scene. The novel’s fury and frustration at our wanton destruction of the natural world is more than warranted. The urgency of the issue cannot be overstated. In a recent interview, Flanagan echoed or perhaps misquoted Tommy, the book’s moral anchor, when he referred to The Living Sea of Waking Dreams as a ‘rising scream’. The novel, he stated, emerged from the struggle between despair and hope that our present moment has forced upon us. He gives the last word to hope. I hope he’s right.