It's the late 19th century, in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. A dust storm rolls in on a little boy playing outside his house; caught in its bewilderingness, he becomes lost. His disappearance will last for seven days, and bring together the whole town to search for him: his mother and father, their five daughters, including headstrong Cissy, their Aboriginal servants; the local constable and his new wife, who's been snogging a Swedish painter; the painter and his English wife; an Australian army sergeant and his Black trackers; the rich old sheep station family for whom the mountains in which the boy is lost are named; a group of sheep shearers; and even an Afghan camel driver. The boy Denny, lost and delirious, imagines himself at the whim of strange gods, half-invented and half-borrowed from Aboriginal legend.
The Sun Walks Down is one of those books that seeks to capture a particular place at a particular moment in history. Author Fiona McFarlane's Australia is a frontier in its second generation; already books have been written about the sheep-rearing patriarch who has only just recently died, painting him, for right and wrong, as a hardscrabble pioneer of a new nation. Sheep-station Australia, of course, relies on labor procured by certain degrees of coercion. I liked one small detail in which the rich old widow covets a finely woven shawl that one of the Black trackers uses to cover his withered arm, and which she tries to procure by any underhanded means. Billy spars with his master, Denny's father Matthew, every day, but he knows that he must hold back his true strength and skill; he harbors a resentment toward the rich sheep mogul, his former master, who prevented him from journeying into the interior to complete the ritual that would make him a man. It's to the book's credit, I think, that there isn't a single representative of Aboriginal existence, but several, with their own positions and motivations, and who are pointedly drawn from different tribal communities, not even speaking each other's language. The class distinction between the Axams and Wallaces speaks just as loudly--here, in the clash between Black and White, Anglo-Australian and Foreigner, Capital and Labor, McFarlane captures the truth that occurs alongside the origin of national myth.
McFarlane's Australia is a big place, and red: its garish red sunsets match its red landscapes, and it's those that the Swedish painter Rapp has come to paint. His attempts to make sense of the hostile, alienating landscape that has recently swallowed the young boy, that landscape called Australia, are some of the book's most interesting moments, I think. I also rather liked the sections with Denny himself, drawn into that landscape by his own fevered, boyish imagination. But the rest of the book I thought just didn't do enough with its raw materials. McFarlane makes certain feints at drama and escalation--the sergeant begins to settle on a theory that the town's dopey vicar has abducted the boy--but the story is mostly motionless, eventless. We are told of intense histories, like Minna's dalliance with Rapp, Billy's humiliation at the hands of his master, but for the most part history never seems to erupt into the present, only simmer. When Denny is found safe--if a little touched--at the end, I felt let down, as if I had been waiting for a climax that never comes.
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