This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane.
The Sun Walks Down is a novel about getting lost, except it isn’t.
A work of literature that is both elegant and addictive is a very rare thing, but Fiona McFarlane’s new novel achieves that fine balance with aplomb.
I knew that I’d read the book as soon as I learned that it was edited by FSG president Mitzi Angel. Some of her recent highlights include Ben Lerner’s
The Topeka School and Sheila Heti's
Pure Colour (my favorite book of 2022), and this new novel is a worthy addition to her roster.
The story of a young boy disoriented during a dust storm on his family’s farm in nineteenth-century colonial Australia,
The Sun Walks Down drifts between the various townspeople who learn of the boy’s disappearance and join the search — or don’t. McFarlane’s writing, in third person, manages to be so perceptive that it captures the thoughts and perspectives of each character — a kind of pyrotechnic that is accomplished so skillfully that I didn’t initially notice it.
A kind of pyrotechnic that is accomplished so skillfully that I didn’t initially notice it
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As the novel flows from person to person, revealing their dissatisfactions and aspirations, the news of a lost child captures their attentions to various degrees, and reminds them all about the dangers that are ever-present in the colonized land they reside on.
Their reactions differ, but most find themselves mirroring the boy at the moment the dust storm finally settles down: this isn’t a novel about getting lost. This is a novel about realizing that you are lost.
This isn’t a novel about getting lost. This is a novel about realizing that you are lost.
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One of the characters is a European painter, and art and the artist’s vision is much-discussed. “A pure vision, realistically rendered” is an apt but incomplete description of this novel. It gleams with a striking beauty, but it’s the details that demand a deeper look, that demand one’s full attention.