The Sun Walks Down - Fiona McFarlane

 

Some years ago, in the 70s, I believe, there was a Nicholas Roeg film, Walkabout, starring a very young Jenny Agutter. The film told the story of two children lost in the Australian outback in harrowing circumstances, and they were befriended by an Aboriginal boy to whom they owed their lives. The film had quite an impact on me and cemented in me a reverence for the Aboriginal culture.

When I begin to read Fiona Mcfarlane’s The Sun Walks Down. I was reminded of that film. I found a similar mood to be created. At the heart of this novel is Denny, six years old and lost, after a dust storm, in the outback. And Aboriginal trackers play a big part in the story. Whilst lost child novels are not unusual, they generally belong to the crime, thriller, police procedural genres. Not the case here at all.

When the realisation and full impact that Denny is missing hits his family and his community the wheels are set in motion. It’s a devastating event. But I feel that Denny’s lostness was a metaphor for how lost all these disparate people are in their various ways. And how if they can find Denny, they can find themselves too.

Although the action is set in Australia, where the climate, governed by the sun, plays a big part, it has a multicultural feel too with the Swedish artist, and his English wife to the German mother of the Police Constable’s new wife suggesting also the colonialism that overwhelmed the country. It is as if all these people pivot around Denny who remains just out of reach for much of the book. Denny presents as a spiritual force in the bush, a trait intuited by his father’s Aboriginal tracker, Billy, who senses Denny’s “otherness“. Denny is too young, maybe to articulate any self mysticism, but he tells his mother when she avers that he is her Denny, he says “I’m not anybody.“

The plot is cleverly constructed around all of the characters and their particular needs and nuances, for example, Minna, desperate for love on all levels, Cissy, a potential feminist if she did but know it.  Conflicts, both physical and cerebral,  jostle for position between the search parties. The tensions rack up throughout the progress of the story, until they explode into flames towards the book’s conclusion.

But it isn’t merely an engrossing narrative that renders Ms McFarlane’s work so striking. It’s ambitious in concept and throws up a number of considerations as the characters weave in and out of their own lives and the lives of the others. Each character has their flaws and impediments – Mary, with her hearing difficulties, the Reverend Daniels, so well intentioned, yet so ineffectual – all lost within their own worlds. For a while, I thought that, Bess, alone, was less lost as she retreated into her private room but, no, she is as lost as they all are.

Watching over them all, from the physically lost Denny, to the metaphorically lost others, is the sun - that synthesis of light that sees us all wherever in the world we may be. Through the duration of the novel , the star produces the most exceptional sunsets. Karl Rapp, the artist tells us that in Sweden, the sun doesn’t set, it walks down, hence the title, and the sun in this story is walking marathons and you feel at times that it is the sun, alone, that is dictating what transpires.

The author’s prose is stunning. It’s the kind of prose that fills you up to overflowing leaving you somehow astounded that people are able to create such pictures from their word palettes. Such effective images - 

‘George would be disconcerted if it stopped – it would be as if a number had fallen off a clock face.’

‘Failure is a stooped, pale figure with an open mouth and swollen eyes.’

You may be wondering if the lost Denny is found. I’ll not divulge suffice to say I think it would be a decision for the reader to make when they’ve read the book.

At the time of writing this piece I learned that the book has just been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize, a most worthy contender. And in fact, I won my copy of this book in the Walter Scott Historical Fiction giveaway  - which meant I could cancel my library reservation!😉 Many thanks for my generous prize.