McFarlane, Fiona. The Sun Walks Down. Allen and Unwin, Australia, 2022. F;12/23.

I enjoyed a light hearted story by McFarlane in the Paris Review (246) about a sexy offbeat flight attendant. It was cool-colloquial but there was a subtle buried twist of emotion in the cocktail. Ms. McFarlane apparently speaks several literary dialects: this novel is quite different. It’s set in rural South Australia in the late 19^th century and there’s a gallery of real characters, failing farmers, sheep ranchers, aboriginals, various economic circumstances, a British artist couple wandering around in the outback, and a six-year-old boy lost in the wilderness.

After a dust storm Denny Wallace wanders away and the search for him is the plot’s framework. His dad and several sisters participate, an entitled policeman from some distance away leads the enterprise inaptly, a local cop who has just married rich-family daughter Minna goes off with trackers on their own, and PLOT ALERT after several days of doubt the artist couple runs across the boy. END PLOT ALERT.

The tone and events are loaded with emotional detail and asperity. The history, climate, texture, and Victorian attitudes of the place are drawn out and drawn together with timeless sharp insight. A native character Billy senses the location to be “dense with motion: the motion of ancestors, spirits, the animals that should be here and the animals that shouldn’t, songs, stories, people, goods, water, minerals, the railway, the roads, stock tracks, fire, and the celestial bodies.”

Although it’s Australian argot, the sun seeming to walk down through the emotional tension of the search for Denny makes a fiery red picture, which picture is also the preoccupation of the capable British artist who grasps for how to produce its moral and emotional force. There’s also a tension of opposites that squeezes the complicated plot toward a paradox. Minna “turns away and yanks at the donkey’s lead rope as if she wants to both punish and protect it.” Billy “… thinks of Henry and doesn’t think of Henry, which, for (him) is the same thing.” Opposites with similar inner temperature.

Rough episodes parallel the plot which tightens the credibility of the central uncertainty. One of the trackers breaks a leg and an old doctor sets it:

The veins rise and pulse at Jimmy’s temples, the tendons of his neck stretch taut, Foster growls, Billy bears down on Jimmy’s shoulders with all his weight, the doctor grunts, and with a loud, crisp crack the bone is set. Jimmy’s body goes limp…

and Henry, one of the sons of a wealthy family drowns on horseback crossing a river:

The horse (Barabbas) lost its footing when the flood rose over Henry’s knees, and Henry simply slipped out of the saddle and disappeared. Barabbas swam for a brief time against the current before he was carried down the creek, managing to hold his head above the water. He bared his teeth and his white eyes rolled. Billy cried out as he ran down the riverbank. Ahead of him, Barabbas, swept against a tree, found his footing; Billy stepped into the edge of the tugging creek, reached out, took Barabbas’s lead rope, and pulled. Billy pulled and wept and the horse screamed. The terror, the terror of the horse. And when, finally, Barabbas rose up, came clear, and scrambled—somehow—onto the bank: there was Henry beneath his horse, his boot still in the left stirrup, his leg still in the boot, his shirt still red, and his head broken open. Barabbas was trembling all over.

Our author feels the distant time and the strange realities of the setting, and because of the story’s emotional pull I wanted to bridge that distance. To be there somehow. But purposely being held away as a reader strangely also pictured the magic of the story, of stories. Is it real? Of course it is!

Strongly emotional and intriguing writing for me. I’m not sure it would be so for everyone but I’d say definitely worth a try.

9.2/9.3