When a young boy goes missing at the beginning of Fiona McFarlane’s masterful novel, The Sun Walks Down, the event kicks off a meditative exploration of a linked group of Europeans and Aboriginal people who live in the unforgiving land of South Australia. One might expect the disappearance to unite the community but McFarlane upturns our anticipations by showing us how misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and misguided thinking can lead people down very wrong paths.
The Sun Walks Down begins on what is an ordinary day for some and, for others, a day of celebration as a local girl marries the police constable she loves. Denny Wallace’s day is an ordinary one, at least at first. Denny is six years old and is, according to his acerbic older sister Cissy, a bit of a slacker. His other sisters and his mother know, however, that Denny doesn’t see the world the way the rest of his family does. Denny refuses to walk on the red hill close to their home and believes that malicious gods walk the earth in the nearby bush. So when Denny loses his way while collecting kindling, there’s no telling where the boy might go or what he might do. His fright makes it hard for his father, oldest sister, two police officers, and Aboriginal trackers to find him before the sun and dehydration do their worst.
The narration occasionally touches on Denny’s increasingly perilous progress through the bush as it bounces around to visit different characters. We spend a lot of time with angry Cissy, who sees almost everyone around her (including her parents) as idiots or dreamers. This anger doesn’t thwart Cissy from barging into all official efforts to find Denny. Instead, that anger spurs Sissy on, as she is the kind of person who does things because she believes that others either won’t or that they’ll mess it up. We also spend time with the young woman who got married that day, the somewhat spoiled and very lustful Minna. Minna would much rather spend time with her new husband instead of sending him off to traipse through the bush after Denny. Her husband’s absence sends her back to her proud German mother’s home in search of company. We also are treated to the attitudes of the equally proud Sergeant Foster, who firmly believes that he knows exactly where to find the missing boy and that anyone who says differently is a sadly misguided idiot.
The Sun Walks Down is a beautifully written story, for all its tensions and the prejudices it uncovers. I loved how McFarlane built the town and environs of the fictional Fairly, South Australia—especially the fully realized characters she created to populate that landscape. For all that they inhabit the same patch of earth, they all seem to live very separate lives from each other. No one is fully open with anyone else, even the supposedly enamored pair of artists who’ve arrived in the area to paint the sky. Usually, when an author creates a multi-voiced mosaic novel like The Sun Walks Down, there are parts that seem dull compared to others. It’s difficult to juggle a cast this large without some parts dragging or just less interesting. That is very much not the case with The Sun Walks Down; all of it fascinated. I felt like I was out in the bush with them, thirsty and sunburned, or cooped up in a ranch house where the younger generation have taken over everything and only stop by with occasional news. This novel is simply brilliant.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.