The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane review the lost boy

Otherworldly sunsets, family tensions and Aboriginal lore collide in a blazing mystery set in the colonial outback

Fiona 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. It was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award and won several prizes in the author’s native Australia. 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.

There are seven sunsets in the story, which unfolds during a September week in 1883 in the South Australian outback surrounding the Flinders Ranges. They are a violent, “apocalyptic red” and coincide with a dust storm that sweeps through the small town of Fairly and its neighbouring farms. Once the storm has passed, six-year-old Denny Wallace is missing from his parents’ smallholding. 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.

Fairly has just celebrated the wedding of pretty, restless Minna Baumann to the local constable. 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. Denny’s father, Mathew, conducts his own search, pursued by his tough-minded daughter, Cissy. 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. As tensions swirl between the different families, everyone hazards a theory about Denny’s disappearance until misinformation and gossip cloud the whole picture.

A 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. They are bewitched by the painterly possibilities of this alien landscape. The Rapps, as their name suggests, are at once rapt celebrants of the country and rapacious exploiters of its strangeness. Karl is ecstatically moved – possessed, even – by those otherworldly sunsets. 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. That you should never trust an artist to choose life over art becomes clear when Denny, wandering through the desert, crosses their path.

At 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. These are variously poetic, self-serving or sentimental, depending on the narrative at hand.

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. It’s also represented by pompous Sergeant Foster, author of books celebrating Australia’s “vast, rolling plains” – he’s thinking of writing another, just as cliched, about the Wallace case. Then there’s the narrative of Christian heroism, advanced by men like Denny’s preacher grandfather with his idea of a “dry country” transformed by faith and work, and the doomed economic heroism of Mathew Wallace, who has staked his family’s survival on an already failing attempt to grow wheat in the outback.

Set against these stories, the novel offers us a mysterious and fluid vision of the country’s Aboriginal lore, its ancient contours and its unpredictable weather. The writing is tremendous, whether McFarlane is describing a scattering of rocks, “grey and plum and dun”, or the sunsets transforming even Henry’s ridiculous palm trees into “black and gold … as if they were planted especially for a sky like this one”. The first-generation Australian characters are more aligned with this other dimension than their immigrant parents. Billy Rough, the Wallaces’ Aboriginal hired hand, recognises a kindred spirit in Denny, who “speaks to invisible things” and sees gods who aren’t “good or bad”. Amoral Minna finds physical satisfaction wherever she can, while Cissy, with her “secret sort of face”, has a healthy contempt for the traditional female roles – servant, wife or both – on offer to her. Their difference extends the colonial narrative and complicates it.

McFarlane is always aware of the artist’s responsibility when attempting, as Karl Rapp says, a “flawed translation of the world”. This is a beguiling novel, not just of ideas about history and place but of fiercely beautiful translations.

The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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