RACHEL MORTON The Sun Was Electric Light. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Set in Guatemala, Australian Rachel Morton’s debut novel of a young woman searching for her place in the world is already a prize-winner.

Ruth is in her thirties and is disillusioned with life. She had moved to New York because it was the ‘furthest place’ from her hometown in Australia, but life there has not worked out, although she has done all the usual things – ‘lived a normal life’.

On the outside I seemed to be functioning well, but inside I had the feeling that nothing had meaning and also that everything was fake. Even the waves of the sea looked fake … they looked fake, as though we were on a movie set and the sea was a giant swimming pool and the sun was electric light.

‘Things had never really been good’ but she believes that things will get better if you work at them. She thinks life seems to be about love and staying alive, and she remembers loving the lake at Panajachel in Guatemala, but nothing since then. ‘That,’ she thinks, ‘was part of how [she] wasn’t well,’ so she decides to go back there.

She leaves her job, gets rid of her furniture and books a flight to Guatemala, from where she will take a bus. But even on the flight she is not convinced that she is doing the right thing.

The Sun Was Electric Light is a strange book. Ruth is the narrator and her prose is often as bare and factual as the rituals and list-making that filled her life in New York. She observes things that happen around her, like the passengers on the flight clapping and kissing each other when the plane lands, but she remains distanced from it all.

Even at times when she is struggling to cope, the prosaic surfaces:

I spoke to the lake … I told the lake that I needed work if I was going to stay and I told the lake why it was important that I stayed … Then when it was dark, I walked back home. Nothing had happened. I made tea and went to bed.

In Panajachel she is ‘trying’ to be normal, so she accepts the invitation of an Italian couple she has just met to go to a bar with them:

I watched the people and I had the feeling again that nothing here was real. Like the time with the waves. I felt separate, as though I was watching through a screen. There was nothing here for me.

But she does notice a woman who seems to be different to those around her. She seems independent, unusual, slightly exotic and beautiful: ‘I knew she was strange. I wanted to know her.’

It is some time before she actually meets this woman, Carmen, and before that she meets Emilie, who quickly becomes her friend, companion and lover. Emilie seems confident and stable, and Ruth begins to dream of making ‘a quiet and mundane life’ with her, but she is determined to stay in Panajachel, and Emilie, who is about to start a new job in Pátzcuaro in Mexico, soon leaves.

Ruth tries to convince herself that the episode was ‘not real life’ but she feels lost. She is also running out of money and knows she must leave the hotel, find somewhere to live and find a job. She moves to a small house outside the tourist areas and makes economies, but that is not enough. Moving and job-hunting keep her busy, but she becomes increasingly frantic as work seems unobtainable. Then she bumps into Dwain.

She had met him a few weeks before and knows that his parents are American and have returned to the States, leaving him in their house in Jaibalito, just across the lake from Panajachel. He grew up in this area, knows the local people and foreigners, and might be able to help her find work. He is also close to Carmen, who, most of the time, shares the house with him, and it is through Carmen that Ruth finds work. ‘There’s this family,’ Carmen says,

 ‘Friends of my parents’ friends. They are looking for someone to take care of their kids. Three boys, I think. Rich Guatemalans. You know the type. Poor little rich boys. Poor things.’

She said that some years ago she had babysat the eldest boy, who would now be about eleven, and that the mother was ‘intense’ and the father was never home.

To begin with Ruth’s new job satisfies her. She enjoys being with the younger boys and feels hopeful. It is as if life has finally brought her things – ‘first Emilie, now the boys’. Carmen, however, warns her that she is ‘too soft’, and that the boys’ mother, sooner or later, will ‘walk all over’ her. Ruth does not believe her but already the ‘Senora’ has been leaving lists of things she expects Ruth to do besides looking after the boys. In the end Carmen is right and Ruth leaves the job and must find another.

Meanwhile, Carmen and Dwain have invited her to join them in Jaibalito and Dwain suggests he might know of a job there for her and a place to live. Emilie, too, has been in touch with her, but when Carmen asks about Emilie, Ruth is adamant that she will not leave and join her.

‘I’m not going anywhere. It’s a different life, the one she has.’ I said all of that. But it didn’t feel right.

Ruth begins to work as a volunteer at a local school, and is allowed to live in a small hut adjoining it. Once again her life has purpose, but it becomes clear that Carmen and Dwain, who, like her, are foreigners in this place, have problems not much different to her own. Carmen, in particular, is unstable. Her parents had ‘taken bad acid together and it had driven them crazy’. They had been hospitalised, then returned to the States, ‘dumping her’ (as Carmen puts it) with Dwain’s parents. She often disappears for days and according to Dwain:

‘She goes wild, you know? She hangs out with the party kids in the bars in Zone 2. The gay kids, the trans kids, the women who want to have lots of sex and who don’t want to have to get married. The misfits. The ones who have been kicked out of their families … Carmen goes to be with them. They’re intense, but they match Carmen perfectly.’

Ruth’s contact with Emilie is intermittent. She thinks about her often and she sees Emilie’s life and Carmen’s as ‘two ways of living in the world’:

Both ways were inside me and I had to choose. It was obvious. The only way that worked was Emilie’s. Carmen was beautiful and dysfunctional. In the past I had wanted to be more like her. Now, I needed to be like Emily.

She arranges leave from the school to take a carving course in Antigua, and finds peace and stability while carving. When she returns, she spends her evenings practising what she has learned on small pieces of scrap wood that she finds around the place. She throws the small figures she carves into the lake or burns them, which feels good.

Reading The Sun Was Electric Light, which immerses you in the lives of people who have lost their compass in life and struggle to make sense of their existence, is not always comfortable but it is real. Rachel Morton draws you into their worlds and keeps you hoping they will find their way. Her novel is strange, thoughtful and honest and, in the end, full of life and love and the promise that Ruth may now be able truly to see the sun.

This is Rachel Morton’s debut novel. As Panajachel it won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2024, and it has now received the 2025 UQP Quentin Bryce Award.

Rachel Morton The Sun Was Electric Light University of Queensland Press 2025 PB 224pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Australian writers, Guatemala, life choices, Rachel | Morton, UQP Quentin Bryce Award, Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, women writers