Fiona McFarlane’s novel meditates on how select perspectives are captured,crafted and preserved as culturally meaningful.Credit:Yanina Gotsulsky
Scaffolded by detailed research into its time and place,The Sun Walks Down attempts to integrate the voices usually written out of such stories. Mary Wallace,the mother of the novel’s lost child,six-year-old Denny,worries,“There are strangers in the desert:natives,hawkers,swagmen,stockmen,teamsters,Chinese labourers and Afghans with their camels.” Some of these are integrated as fringe narrators,along with a maid and a sex worker.
These “other” voices amount to guest appearances. Billy,who is enlisted by his employer,Denny’s father,to help track the boy,is an exception:he’s one of a core group of narrators in this polyphonic novel. And the lost (taken) children of the stolen generations haunt the narrative,albeit in a handful of lines,where Billy’s sister Nancy remembers her “light” taken children.
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane.
Other core narrators include Denny (who loses his way in a dust storm in the opening pages),his acerbic older sister Cissy (described by her teacher as “fixated on knowing”),his parents,who run a failing wheat farm (typical of the region),and travelling Swedish artists Karl and Bess Rapp,worshipped by the white Australians they meet for their exotic (European) brand of otherness.
Then there are the policemen tasked with finding Denny:local Robert Manning,married on the day of Denny’s disappearance and distracted by lust for his “burning” bride Minna (another recurring voice),and visiting Sergeant Foster,author of books on “the frontier”. And Joanna Axam,mistress of local station Thalassa – who has everything,but covets the possessions of others.
As we inhabit new perspectives,we learn new details that add depth and texture – from secrets revealed,to different ways of experiencing the world. For instance,Denny sees the sunset as “the time of day when the sun touched the red hill and the gods came creeping out of it”. The farmers consider the sky in terms of the weather,and their harvest. And Karl Rapp considers how to capture it on canvas. “The sun doesn’t set in Swedish,it walks down,” he observes.
The voices do occasionally falter. For example,Billy refers to “the native camp” at Thalassa,where he grew up. Would he,in his own head,think of it that way? Or refer to his family who live there as “relatives”? It’s hard to know,as a white reviewer reviewing a white writer,how authentic Billy’s perspective is.