THE SUN WALKS DOWN by Fiona McFarlane

This review originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of Historical Novel Society

A six-year-old boy disappears from his family farm during a dust storm in late 19th-century South Australia, and the community rallies to the family’s aid. With a keen wit, the author impressively develops the searchers and interested others to reveal their essences. The boy’s grieving mother and indefatigable searching father. An imperious but bungling lawman who leads the search. The farmer with the “befuddlement of the blue blood who comes out to the colonies and finds himself on a level with every other man.” A drifting Swedish painter and his illustrator English wife. The new bride of the local constable, “the kind of woman who, in loving man, loved all men.” A pathetic vicar; misunderstood and demeaned Indigenous peoples; and Afghan cameleers.

Misperceptions, idiosyncrasies, petty jealousies, suspicions, superstitions, fears, prejudices, and lusts are woven into a tapestry of memorable characters and dark suspense as the search continues day after day, and fears for the boy’s safety mount. The story seems perfectly set in a harsh, arid land that is filled with “saltbush and dry soil and every fly that ever bothered God,” and where visually striking sunsets dominate the horizon. It renders a convincing portrait of a hardscrabble environment that was probably quite different in reality from romantic visions of the fair-weathered Australian colony back in Victorian England.

The reader is left to consider some hard-hitting parallels of Australian settlement to American westward expansion and its dark chapters of subjugation of native societies. A very impressive second novel from a prize-winning Australian author who has also published a collection of short stories.