Just finished Richard Flanagan's latest, Wanting. It's a wonderfully imaginative and haunting piece of historical fiction, twining together the stories of Dickens' decision to leave his wife for the young actress Ellen Ternan, the failed Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage, and Sir John Franklin's previous stint as lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's Land. At the heart of the book is the Franklins' adoption of a young Tasmanian aborgine named Mathinna; tying the two seemingly disconnected strands together is the play, The Frozen Deep--which Dickens and Wilkie Collins wrote in response to the Franklin disaster, and which brought Ternan into his life.

I don't have immense patience for the sort of biographical creativity that is involved in works of this sort. It can be done so very badly--the "historical" characters often read like costumed puppets delivering very contemporary ideas and thinking in very contemporary ways, and often, too, the tone of the writing is funny, either treating the past as a kind of quaint cartoon that exists for our amusement, or as some variant of church, to be handled only in hushed, reverent tones. But when it's done well, it's just marvelous. And Flanagan does it well. (No surprise, if you know his excellent Gould's Book of Fish, set in an Australian penal colony during the early nineteenth century.)

Find out more about Wanting here--and notice especially the section on how Flanagan drew on what is known about real historical figures to craft his book. Wanting will be published in September -- but if you don't want to wait, you can do what I did and score a used review copy at Amazon.