Until recently, the critical consensus on Flanagan admitted and celebrated his talent as a novelist while noting that his antipodean brand of magical realism sometimes suffered from an excess of magic – his imagination at times exceeding his reader’s willingness to suspend their dis- belief. That, though, was before 9/11 and a period that saw a partial suspension of the West’s commitment to openness, tolerance, pluralism and other liberal goods.

Flanagan’s literary response to these developments was sharp, to say the least, and wholly unlike his previous work. The Unknown Terrorist (2006) is less a novel than a guerrilla documentary, the kind of film where rough editing and shaky digital camerawork are visual guarantors of integrity. With its tabloid realism, sawn-off sentences and propulsive plot, The Unknown Terrorist was not nearly as pretty as his previous efforts, but it was highly effective. Although Wanting returns to the time, place and general tenor of Flanagan’s earlier novels, especially the convict-era Gould’s Book of Fish: A novel in twelve fish (2001), something of Terrorist’s salutary anger, unperfumed prose style and narrative economy has been retained: which is just as well, because Wanting covers a lot of ground.

The novel opens in 1839, on an island in Bass Strait, where the few remaining members of those Aboriginal tribes who resisted European arrival have been taken, following the wholesale slaughter and subjugation of their fellows. Robinson, the ‘rather pumped up little Presbyterian carpenter come preacher’ who first tracked down these residual specimens, has been rewarded with the title of Protector, £500 a year and a free hand in their care and rehabilitation. Robinson turns out to be a diligent overseer of this experiment in colonial high-mindedness. He enforces a wide-ranging regime of cultural Anglicisation, including European clothing, diet, and religion. Something of an amateur scientist, he even performs autopsies following the many deaths among the indigenes from diseases that attack their bodies and, to the Protector’s private disquiet, maladies that strike their souls.

Of the remaining young there is only one girl, Mathinna, who shows spark. And so, when the recently installed Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin and his wife visit the community to witness the progress of the project, it is Mathinna whom the Protector shows off. Lady Franklin is much taken with the girl. She is obviously intelligent, pretty and poised beyond her years – and she is an orphan. Mathinna appeals to Lady Franklin’s awakened maternal instincts, as well as to her desire to undertake an experiment in education. She decides to adopt Mathinna and, in doing so, shows the backward Vandemonians and the wider world that, given the proper grounding in civilised mores and a solid grounding in the arts and sciences, even a savage girl can be transformed into a gentlewoman.

By now, some will recognise the lineaments of historical fact. An Aboriginal girl named Mathinna did exist; she was raised for a period on Flinders Island before being sent to live with a pious white family; and then, as part of a not dissimilar experiment, to Government House, where she was taught alongside the governor’s daughter. This historical Mathinna was also left in an orphanage after the Franklins were recalled to Britain. She was eventually relocated with the other remaining Indigenous Tasmanians to Oyster Cove, where, some years later, she was discovered, drowned in a puddle.

In Wanting, Flanagan takes this biographical sketch and pulls out the oils. He paints her using a subjective third-person voice that skips in and out of Mathinna’s consciousness while also accessing the hopes and desires that she inspires in Robinson, Sir John and Lady Franklin, and others. As an act of historical ventriloquism, it is as presumptuous as it is brilliantly achieved.

What saves this from being a straightforward hijacking of the historical record is, paradoxically, another ficto-biographical narrative running alongside. This second story is concerned with the novelist Charles Dickens and his life, from the death of his daughter until his first romantic encounter with Ellen Ternan, the young actress who was to be the secret companion of his final years. The hinge between these two narratives is a meeting between Dickens and Jane Franklin, two decades after the events at Flinders Island. By now, her explorer husband and his third Arctic expedition have been lost for a number of years, despite several missions mounted at Lady Franklin’s instigation. She begs the writer to use his reputation to fight scurrilous rumours of cannibalism amongst Franklin’s men raised by a returning Arctic traveller.

Although he has little time for Lady Jane, Dickens accedes to her request. But his defence is based on reasoning – that only savages would commit such a grievous sin, and Englishmen were incapable of backsliding into such savagery – that sounds racist to modern ears. It is meant to: as the impeccable spokesman for Victorian virtues, ‘the laureate of family’ no less, Dickens’s own slide into adulterous abandon is fodder for Flanagan’s unfolding thesis.

Like some postmodern Lytton Strachey, Flanagan wants to show us how exemplary Victorians such as Dickens and Sir John Franklin were trapped, by their adherence to assumptions about class, gender and race, into a destructive hypocrisy. But his real achievement lies in how neatly he weaves these men’s personal flaws into the larger story of how nineteenth-century notions of race led to the genocide of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people (an act that Flanagan carefully has a young naturalist named Charles Darwin applaud).

Perhaps mindful of the criticisms directed towards novelists using Australian history in recent years, Flanagan has set up a website providing the empirical materials from which Wanting is built. Since it is not yet online, however, it is difficult to know just how far the novelist has departed from historical record (or, given the actions attributed to John Franklin, traduced it).

In an afterword, Flanagan disavows any revisionist intentions, writing that ‘this novel is not a history, nor should be read as one’. Instead, ‘The stories of Mathinna and Dickens, with their odd but undeniable connection, suggested to me a meditation on desire – the cost of denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs.’ And this it certainly is. There is an important moment early on when Robinson, as a part of his negotiations with Mathinna’s tribe to relinquish their struggle, is obliged to dance with them:

Later he would recall it as ridiculous, but then, as he leapt and yowled ... the universe had flowed into him, he was open to everything, he was alive to other humans and to himself in a way he had never known ... The dance was dizzying, a thing both wicked and exhilarating ... For a moment – perhaps the only moment in his life – Robinson felt freed into something beyond himself.

While the superstructure of this superbly sleek, confident and persuasive novel may be based on a questionable blurring of fiction with fact, this wicked and exhilarating dance – and the attraction and repulsion it inspires in the corseted men and woman into whose charge the tribes- men fall – is a local tragedy that only a novelist could raise to the level of universal fable.