FIONA McFARLANE The Sun Walks Down. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith
Fiona McFarlane’s story of a lost child reveals a cross-section of colonial Australia.
‘The boy met a god by the hollow tree.’ So begins Fiona McFarlane’s second novel, The Sun Walks Down, and so begins a kaleidoscopic tour through the social strata of early colonial life in regional South Australia. Set precisely in September 1883 in the fictional town of Fairly, near the Flinders Ranges, McFarlane’s novel ostensibly tells the story of the disappearance of six-year-old settler boy Denny Wallace and the town’s efforts to find him. In truth, however, the search is the vehicle by which her novel travels through the perspectives of its characters to evoke the varied subjectivities that inhabited colonial South Australia.
While the novel begins with an inciting incident worthy of any thriller, it soon becomes clear that McFarlane’s true interest is not plot. There is little dramatic tension in the novel, with McFarlane preferring to compel readers by means of a diversity of narrative perspectives. We move from one point-of-view to the next, from Denny’s worried, ineffectual mother to the Aboriginal tracker, Billy, to the limp-wristed and chronically light-headed vicar, and sundry other characters: policemen and children, sexually-frustrated brides, European artists and reclusive German prostitutes who own donkeys and orange trees. This narrative gambit permits McFarlane multi-faceted depictions of her various characters, seen both from inside and out.
While certain characters could be realised more thoroughly – the vicar borders on caricature – their varying perspectives are drawn carefully enough to create intriguing contrasts between their chapters and compel reading even when little concrete action occurs. Denny’s older sister, Cissy, is by far the most rounded character, an intense, intelligent girl whose ‘thirst for knowing’ comes close to embittering her to the restrictions of colonial life.
The natural spaces of northern South Australia are a major focus, with extensive descriptions of ‘the bleak, beautiful country’. While extolling the beauty of the landscape McFarlane is careful to emphasise its alien, inhospitable quality, at least to its white inhabitants, balancing every awe-struck adjective with one to express its ‘choked’ atmosphere or simply that it is in some way ‘disastrous’; Adelaide itself is ‘airless’ even while ‘charming’ (a description Adelaideans have heard – in varying words – many times over). We may assume that McFarlane would like to convey that the beauty of the Australian landscape cannot be appreciated without also considering it as a site of suffering and trauma, as it surely is.
For all the colour of the novel – and it is colourful, the texture of description one of its strengths – one is drawn to wonder why McFarlane committed to an omniscient narrator, since it imparts less of the gritty individuality than a more intimate voice could provide. This narrative distance when moving between characters’ perspectives creates an intellectual rather than emotional effect, as we are told how differing characters see the world rather than seeing and feeling it alongside them. This sometimes has jarring consequences, diminishing the subtlety of the book’s characterisation in favour of directly stating why a character feels or acts the way they do.
For example, at one point George Axam, a long-struggling and unpopular settler, is having a strained but necessary conversation with the Aboriginal tracker, Billy. Through finely placed details it soon becomes clear that George is uncomfortable around Billy. Unfortunately the tension is broken when we are told in plain terms the reason for George’s discomfort: ‘what affronts him is the fact that Billy is free to make choices’. It is a fascinating reason for discomfort and an intriguing basis for a character, especially given the true state of their relative freedoms. It suggests an emotional complexity that could be exploited, but is drained in the space of a sentence.
One implication of the book’s travelling perspective is that there is no single way of describing events, or the town of Fairly, or, by extension, Australian colonisation. McFarlane’s own position can be inferred through the success or failure of various characters – those with prejudiced views are portrayed less sympathetically, imbued with deeper flaws, and unlikely to receive satisfaction or redemption – but overt statements on the fate of South Australia’s Indigenous populations or the colonial project are rare. The closest the book comes is the mysterious claim that ‘a lost child is the thing white people are most afraid of’, a phrase that functions nicely as a thematic statement, resonating with the idea of the white child stolen by natives, or by the landscape, or changed by the unknowable new land into something different to the child’s European forebears. Indeed, the first page states that Denny, a white child, ‘wasn’t pale, exactly – his skin browned in the sun’. To expand this fear of losing children to a claim of differentiation between Aboriginal and European families, however, may go a little too far. Surely such a fear looms over all peoples.
The Sun Walks Down does not necessarily demand more than it gives, but it does demand: McFarlane is content to pause the narrative for several pages to explain the different colours of the sky, or the details of characters’ lives before the events of the novel. Many readers will luxuriate in these digressions, and perhaps as Denny’s continued absence hangs over the inhabitants of Fairly, becoming a niggling worry in the back of the mind, it will disturb these meditations with a sense of troubling tension. Perhaps, after all, there is an important point behind McFarlane’s decision not to tackle the central crisis head on. After all, that is how, for so many decades, white Australia has dealt with the wide-ranging consequences of its beginnings, the fate of its original inhabitants hovering, like missing Denny, as a tension in the back of the mind.
Fiona McFarlane The Sun Walks Down Allen & Unwin 2022 PB 416pp $32.99
Ben Ford Smith is an Adelaide-based writer and the co-author of Drugs, Guns & Lies (2020, Allen & Unwin). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Flinders University, South Australia.
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