And though Anna found Tommy’s spontaneous gesture undignified, even an affront to their mother’s dignity, somehow, with Francie’s wink and Tommy’s embrace it felt that they had been made complicit in their mother’s old age and her body’s collapse, as if the hydrocephalus and the cancer and now the haemorrhage and all her mother’s woes had also become theirs.Īnna felt not pity but revulsion bordering on a strange fear.Īlthough The Living Sea of Waking Dreams begins like an amateurish horror tale it is an elaborate absurdist comedy about the pathology of contemporary consciousness…Īs Anna listened to the doctors talk of various new tests, medicines changing in quantity and type, the alteration of certain nursing regimes, it was as if Francie’s body, now little more than skin clutching the sticks of her bones, was not that of a frail old animal but an intricate twenty-first-century machine that could be kept working with the body’s technicians and engineers ceaselessly oiling, replacing, lubricating and fuelling its various mechanical parts.
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