The Sun Walks Down
“How are they losing their children like this, all over the country?” asks an Afghan cameleer as he passes through the town of Fairly, where The Sun Walks Down is set. Days earlier, the farmhand Billy considers the fear that “a lost child” evokes in the people now implanted on his Country: it is “the one cost of settling on this land that they consider unreasonable”. His sister, once employed as a nursemaid, retells the tale of the Pied Piper, speaking of her two stolen daughters; an Irish housekeeper, in counterpoint, describes an Indigenous story once overheard, about a mother spirit looking for her missing children.
The strange prevalence of stories about lost children in this country is the centre of haunting fascination within Fiona Mcfarlane’s second novel. It opens as a dust storm descends on Fairly and its “high, dark wall” disorients the six-year-old Denny, out gathering kindling near his family’s homestead. Unable to find his way home, he unwittingly enters instead the eerie territory of this legend.
Denny has always had one foot in the mystical world. He is a sensitive, fearful child who sees and speaks to the gods he knows inhabit his surrounds. All of Mcfarlane’s characters, to differing degrees, share this sense of a potent shimmering, just beyond the porous, physical world. For some it is bound to religion, or story and lore; others find it in poetry or art or in the sensual or purposeful. It bursts forth in response to the rocky outcrops and desert light and is variously embraced or rejected in embarrassment. Mcfarlane is exploring the workings of the imagination, the purposes to which it puts both this immense landscape and the immediate circumstances of these characters’ lives. These imaginative processes are what allow these characters to live – but they are also deeply implicated in this country’s colonial project, simultaneously a cause and an effect.
Mcfarlane’s interest in imagination allows this novel its distinctive style. It is multivocal, full of moments of wildness and language of wonderful, luminous strangeness. It slips in and out of timescales, perspectives and knowingness, and the symmetry between its style and subject matter is as skilful as it is satisfying. So too does its examination of the lost child trope balance its self-awareness against the genuine curiosity that motivates it, without ever slipping into cynicism. It’s less a revival than a reconsideration, and one that illuminates the lasting consequence of stories told of and about place.
Allen & Unwin, 416pp, $32.99