The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane: An exciting tale of Australia and European settlers

A new book from Fiona McFarlane is exciting. Her first novel, The Night Guest, was taut, clever and beautiful. Her short stories are exemplary.

The historical setting and traditional plot of The Sun Walks Down are new departures, and in other hands could have gone horribly wrong: September 1883, a small town in southern Australia where European settlers try and fail to replicate the farming practices and social mores of northern Europe in an alien climate and landscape, repressing their dependence on the labour and expertise of Aboriginal people.

A child, Denny, goes missing, the six-year-old son of Mary, daughter of a famous English vicar, and her farmer husband Mathew. The community of Fairly comes together and comes apart in a week of searching the mountains and deserts familiar only to those whose powers are least recognised and respected. Both the landowners and police call immediately on “native trackers”, but there is mutual distrust, an unstable and wholly understandable blend of envy, resentment and desire on both sides.

Denny is not the only one on the loose. Swedish Karl and his English wife Bess, both professional artists, she the more successful, are travelling in search of landscapes to paint, camping wild and living off the land as they learn to read and represent this new world with its new skies. The local vicar, ineffectual and bumbling, seems to have taken to the hills for reasons that may or may not relate to Denny’s disappearance. Denny’s 15-year-old sister Cissy rides the roads and mountains carrying messages and showing more sense and competence than many of the men, but McFarlane has resisted making her a prodigy or anachronistically “feisty”. She’s just a bright and likeable adolescent who values herself more than her community values her, one of the more compelling voices in this gloriously orchestrated book.

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The novel is kaleidoscopic in the Victorian tradition, as much a portrait of a community as Middlemarch or North and South

The novel opens with the wedding of the local constable to Minna, daughter of a bourgeois German woman who is hanging on to the national and class identities in which Minna has no interest, and so Constable Manning’s attention to the search is intermittent and, meanwhile, we also follow Minna’s pleasure in the first days of married life.

The novel is kaleidoscopic in the Victorian tradition, as much a portrait of a community as Middlemarch or North and South, and like its forebears whirls the reader through the interior narratives and households of characters from across the social spectrum. We see how the women, almost all to some extent frustrated by societal limitations, nonetheless enjoy power in accordance with their status. With more courage, McFarlane writes from the points of view of some of those native trackers, Billy whose life has been shaped by the English aristocrat whose death he witnessed and whose land he still works, Tal who is “the best tracker” but also “the best rider, swimmer and hunter”, whose employer won’t spare him from the shearing to look for Denny, and Jimmy whose exquisitely-crafted fur cloak is the object of a rich woman’s longing.

The story of the lost white child is in some ways the story of colonial Australia, often repeated in various forms and media. The fragile and precious scion of civilisation disappears into the dark heart of a savage and incomprehensible landscape in tales that usually show little interest in the uncountable losses of Aboriginal families at the hands of that “civilisation”. It’s a bold move, to tell that tale again, even or especially with a land acknowledgement between the epigraphs and the title page, the first I have seen recognising unceded land invented by the author: “The locations in which this novel takes place would, if they existed, overlap with two Aboriginal nations … I respectfully acknowledge the land’s traditional owners and my novel’s debt to them.”

Good as far as it goes, but land acknowledgements come cheap: this book earns its place by the simultaneous seriousness and playfulness of its commitment to all the voices in the contested times and spaces of its setting. McFarlane knows what she’s doing, and she does it exceptionally well.

• Sarah Moss’s latest novel is The Fell. She teaches creative writing at UCD