![]() ![]() When she realises that one of her own fingers has disappeared – a painless victim to some mystical “silent leprosy” – Anna is oddly unflustered. At home in Sydney, Anna’s possessions are vanishing, too – hocked, she thinks, by her sullen, cash-strapped son. Doom-scrolling on social media, she finds “perverse comfort” in watching the sixth extinction wreak its obliterative carnage – a kind of grim companionship.Ī vanishing world a vanishing mother. “It was like living with a chronically sick smoker,” Flanagan writes, “except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its fouled and collapsing lungs.” It’s a desolation so immense that it’s possible for Anna to lose her own pain inside it. The reef is bleaching and the bees are dying and the sky is black with pyro-cumulus terror. Outside the air-con cool of the hospital, Australia is burning. ![]() ‘Flanagan’s novel may be brutal, but it is not wilfully cruel.’ Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images ![]()
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