![]() There’s the narrative of “civilising” settler heroism, embodied by the late Henry Axam, whose pretentious classical name of Thalassa for his desert sheep station (complete with palm trees) reflects a deeper inability to read the country he is drowned when he rides, dashingly but fatally, into a flooding creek. These are variously poetic, self-serving or sentimental, depending on the narrative at hand. That you should never trust an artist to choose life over art becomes clear when Denny, wandering through the desert, crosses their path.Īt the eye of this narrative storm are the Flinders Ranges themselves, which were “laid down, long ago and slowly, in layers of rock: limestone, for example, sandstone, quartzite … and in the aeons since then have been worn by time and water back into stumps.” In a tale built from the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, they are a still point from which to assess the novel’s jostling human perspectives. In an uncanny parallel with the drama unfolding below, Bess is making sketches for a children’s book about a boy’s adventures in the bush. Karl is ecstatically moved – possessed, even – by those otherworldly sunsets. The Rapps, as their name suggests, are at once rapt celebrants of the country and rapacious exploiters of its strangeness. They are bewitched by the painterly possibilities of this alien landscape. Henry Axam is drowned when he rides, dashingly but fatally, into a flooding creekĪ few miles above Fairly, we encounter the Rapps, Karl and Bess, artists who have come to Australia from Sweden and are now camped in the Flinders Ranges. As tensions swirl between the different families, everyone hazards a theory about Denny’s disappearance until misinformation and gossip cloud the whole picture. Meanwhile, Minna’s imperious German mother, Wilhelmina, and her rival Joanna, widow of the English aristocrat and sheep farmer Henry Axam, provide a pessimistic chorus. ![]() Denny’s father, Mathew, conducts his own search, pursued by his tough-minded daughter, Cissy. Minna waits at home, not always chastely, while her husband sets out with a sergeant who has arrived from Adelaide with two Aboriginal trackers to scour the mountains for the lost boy. Has he strayed into the bush or been snatched by someone? Word of Denny’s disappearance spreads from house to house and, as it does so, McFarlane carries us off on a whirlwind tour of this fictional colonial outpost.įairly has just celebrated the wedding of pretty, restless Minna Baumann to the local constable. Once the storm has passed, six-year-old Denny Wallace is missing from his parents’ smallholding. They are a violent, “apocalyptic red” and coincide with a dust storm that sweeps through the small town of Fairly and its neighbouring farms. There are seven sunsets in the story, which unfolds during a September week in 1883 in the South Australian outback surrounding the Flinders Ranges. ![]() Her second equally distinctive novel also deals with our precarious place in the world, taking its title from the Swedish expression for the setting of the sun. It was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award and won several prizes in the author’s native Australia. F iona McFarlane’s intimate and unnerving debut, 2014’s The Night Guest, described a woman’s mental disorientation as she reaches the end of her life.
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