Does your town have an urban legend? I’ve always been fascinated by the way a story can, like a snowball rolling down a hill, gain in velocity as it iDoes your town have an urban legend? I’ve always been fascinated by the way a story can, like a snowball rolling down a hill, gain in velocity as it is passed along and grow in menacing mass as details soften into murky dread and possibilities. But what horrors and terrible events lend themselves to legends that perpetuate through the ages? Flyaway from Australian author Kathleen Jennings is a darkly immersive journey into Australian folklore and frights as a young girl discovers that the haunting tales whispered around her town might have such sinister truths at their heart. It is folk horror at its finest and reads like an Australian Gothic as the pain of the past haunt the present. Jennings’ prose spirals through haunting figurative language and surreal imagery that pulls the reader along through this beguiling tale as if the novel were a ferocious fairytale forest instead of words on a page. Full of mystery and surprises with brief stories of folklore interwoven with the main plot, Flyaway is alive with fairytale sensibilities as in this tale about generation trauma and uncovering hard truths that are swept under the rug only to return more frightening than ever.
‘Strange, what chooses to flourish here. Which plants. Which stories.’
I’d like to thank Ceallaigh and her excellent review for guiding me to this eerie tale. The story revolves around teenage Bettina Scott who, with the help of two former friends she sometimes thinks of as enemies, is trying to discover a mystery of her family’s recent past when a threatening message written on her fence is followed by an ominous threat that arrives in the mail. Flyaway is best enjoyed with as little knowledge of the plot as possible going into it, and the narrative does—admittedly—begin rather obfuscating though this is all by design. The book garners comparisons to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for a similar gothic atmosphere, ominous dread and unreliable narrator with Bettina being a successful successor to Mericat with her social standoffishness and glaring gaps in personal history while her thoughts are continuously assailed by the voice of her mother chastising her manners and encouraging “ladylike” behavior. It can be tricky to follow at first but hang in there. It is a worthwhile fumbling through the narrative dark because around halfway there is a brilliant moment that suddenly blows aside your confusion like the dispersal of a fog, the seemingly disparate pieces slide into place, and the larger picture comes gloriously into focus. It is like those cartoons where a character walks into the mouth of a beast mistaking the teeth as trees and only gains clarity of their surroundings as the jaws snap shut…
‘I tried to be anxious, but the earth and the grass and the evening breeze surrounded me, as if I had been set into a socket of the world for which I’d been designed.’
Beyond the personal struggles of the teenage cast, there is a larger scope making this just as much a story about this secluded Queensland town and the long feuds, neighborly distrust and legends that linger through generations. Runagate is from a distric ‘somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere, there was a district called – oh, let’s call it Inglewell’ and exist as if in a state of decomposition. The folklore is brought to life through brief tales threaded into the larger narrative, weaving magic and dread into daily reality until it becomes entirely engulfed in the fantastical as a surreal landscape shot through with sorrow. An entire school vanishes into the trees, a bottle might grant wishes, shapeshifters and other terrors with teeth might thrash in the underbrush. It is teeming with Australian folklore and there are some real creepy beasts such as the Megarrity, which I kept misreading in my head as Mega-Gritty though it would make sense if Gritty made his way to Philly after terrorizing the Australian forests for centuries.
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The town itself is framed as ferociously as the folklore with Jennings’ prose crafting the land as a sentient beast and the trees and creatures that crawl amongst them are characters on their own. ‘Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones,’ trees bleeding resin, trees that cloy the decaying buildings and rot of Runagate and seem a testament to the permeating sadness of its atmosphere, trees as omnipresent lurking threats that separate the town from the rest of Australia like the mythical forests of fairytales.
‘Trees towered hard as bronze in still sunlight, and stirred like a living hide in the rolling advent of a storm. If you were born to Runagate with all its fragile propriety, its tidy civilisation, its ring-fence of roads and paddocks, wires and blood, there was nothing else in the world beyond but tree.’
The sense of isolation is thick, both literally and figuratively as divisions between neighbors run deep with the three principal characters coming together as if totems for the legacy of these families. Gary Damson is a particularly well-fixed character in this theme coming from a family of fence builders that for generations ‘keep up fences, walk boundaries.’ Bettina, on the other hand is a legacy of disaster juxtaposed to Trish and the Aberdeens who uphold social norms and status quo. As the story descends into dread and weirdness, they begin to realize the legacy of lore might be more than tall tales to chill you around a campfire.
‘Memory bleed and frayed there, where ghosts stood silent by fenceposts.’ Fable and fairytales often exists as warning or guidance through the dark forests of life. As Folklorist Jack Zipes writes ‘Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.’ Here we find that the tales betray dark secrets and a legacy of betrayals and debts, violence and abuse that cannot remain silent in the past. ‘Truth was shifting the way the land had when we drove: trees sliding behind trees.’ writes Jennings and the reader begins to question if Bettina’s narration is confused because she has pushed aside painful memories, and is the truth transforming into terrors that haunt the countryside demanding confrontation. Under the stones of stories we find the violence of patriarchy and colonialism, the sins of greed and grief perpetuating themselves down through generations as trauma grips people's hearts and in turn they commit emotional and physical violence as a sense of control over others. This is a story with teeth and the wails of those who have been bitten.
‘If all those stories mean anything, they mean sometimes people do just disappear. And maybe they can be found.’
An incredible little novella that, while confusing at first, pays off in the end, Flyaway embodies the spirit of fairytales and has a few of its own to tell. There is a familiar story at the heart of this, though which one is a major reveal late in the novel I won’t spoil, and this works as a haunting Australian gothic tale that probes the darkness of the human heart. Sharp and sinister, Flyaway is a real treat.
4.5/5
‘Through the soles of her feet and hands, through her skin, the land sang to her: dark and silver, the bones of the world.’
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‘They saw the world itself as one more in an endless series of plains.’
There is a basic human instinct to look for meaning in life, to open the door o‘They saw the world itself as one more in an endless series of plains.’
There is a basic human instinct to look for meaning in life, to open the door of reality in hopes to find of an elaborate clockwork beneath it all which we can investigate in an attempt at comprehension. This quest for meaning tends to be a journey trod through metaphysical landscapes more so than a shoulder to the wheel, making Art a valuable avenue for an abstract expedition into the heart of reality. If any of our art and philosophical probings have given us a finite answer to life’s greatest mysteries is up for debate, but it must be said that one of art’s greatest assets is the finding more and more beautiful ways to ask the questions. Gerald Murnane’s The Plains does just this by chronicling the journey of a filmmaker who has aims to look ‘for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances’ as he travels deep into the plains of Australia. The plains, elusive ‘vistas of vistas’ seem to endlessly flow into one another on an eternal path towards the center of Australia. While the story of this slim novel is simple—the unnamed narrator arrives in town with a fistfull of research to woo a patron into funding an aesthetic endeavour to unlock mysteries of the plains in new ways and his subsequent years there—there is a lush landscape of ideas as vast and mysterious as the plains themselves to explore. The novel is never bogged down by the philosophical meanderings and is eminently engaging and satisfying like water from the canteen of a desert traveler. The Plains is an extravagant and multi-interpretable toybox of ideas framed as a parable on the quest for meaning through art and all its aspects while our place in the world when it’s structure is viewed through the abstract, all of which is orchestrated through a brilliant prose style which marches far and wide like a heroine or hero on an epic journey.
‘I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret’
There is a Spanish term, Vacilando, which doesn’t exactly translate into English but encompasses the idea of a trip made for the purpose of the journey and not the destination. The Plains is that sort of novel, concerning itself more with the attempts to reach a new understanding of the reality of the plains rather than a successful breakthrough and solution. Not much happens plot-wise beyond the lengthy and full of suspenseful screw turning scene of landowners sitting around ‘the labyrinths of saloon bar’ to hear out the envisioned endeavours men have planned in order to analyze the life of the inner plains. The scene is gripping in the way one waits and waits and waits for weeks to hear word if their poem or story or what-have-you has been accepted or declined for publication. Much of the first act isn’t spent on pushing the ball of story forward but stepping back and world-building an elaborate history or artistic struggles and arguments that seem to play out in dramatic (and occasionally violent) action the way philosophical schools of thought would refute one another while simultaneously capturing their own ideas. What is eminently thrilling is the way artistic opinions are made large like sporting adversaries in a way that envisions art as a life-or-death-like matter of importance. It would seem the inner plainsman have a long history or interpretation of the plains around them and the horizon they can chase but never catch, and these varying interpretations are as polarizing as politics.
‘How did I expect to find so easily what so many others had never found – a visible equivalent of the plains, as though they were mere surfaces reflecting sunlight?’ Flash forward to the present where the war of plains-interpretation is but settling dust. Now a new wave of visionaries wishes to interpret the plains anew. Murnane offers mostly comical but thought-provoking artistic voyages such as an orchestra with each instrument played quietly and at great enough spatial distance from the other instrument so that the listener must wander the room of musicians hearing only one instrument at a time—and hardly so—to ‘draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.’ In fact, much of the novel focuses on impossibility and unattainability. We have art that reaches but cannot grasp, and aloof women the narrator can never reach, and even his film which has yet to begin filming ten years later. The process of attempts and thought formation are what matter, and it seems even the best laid plans often go awry or fail to fruition, because what is sought after will forever be beyond our reach like the horizon on the plains. We can never fulfill an answer, but only ask the question in evermore unique and breathtaking ways; the methods and awareness of a question to be asked that explores every deep and dark facet is the more fascinating story than the release of a climactic conclusion. It’s the sort of thing that puts a fire in our guts to go out and forge our own path. ‘[T]he man who travels,’ theorizes one of the landowners, ‘begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey.’ We must not fear failure and press on regardless, a hero/ine is made by their journey, without which they could never hope to achieve their crowning act.
‘We’re disappearing through the dark hole of an eye that we’re not even aware of.’
While the use of art as an exploratory device beats loudest in the novel’s chest, it is just a muscle to bring to life the larger theme of the novel. ‘Every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote, private plain,’ says the narrator. All of us are traveling inward, like the narrator across the seemingly endless Australian plains, seeking an understanding of ourself and the world around us. The plains, mentioned multiple times per page, are the chief object here, but what stand-in they serve in the novel’s parable is widely open to interpretation. This multiple interpretative quality of every aspect of the novel is its greatest glory, giving a meta-fictional flair as the meaning is as elusive as the the meaning behind the quest for meaning is in the book.
‘All talk of a nation presupposed the existence of certain influential but rarely seen landscapes.’
The plains are often compared to mirrors, launching a gleefully cyclical thought pattern about how we reflect the world and how the world reflects us. There is much emphasis on how different the inner plains are than the outer plains, and an investigation if inner Australian constituted a vastly different community and ideology than general Australia. ‘The boundaries of true nations were fixed in the souls of men,’ says the narrator, asking the reader to consider the abstract ideas that are borders, both physically and metaphysically. The struggle is not between inner Australia and outer Australia, but any individual or idea and the grand wide-sweeping scale of existence and transferable to any form of this scenario that the reader chooses to use as a basis of interpretation.
Murnane has an exquisite prose style that launches into a lengthy and healthy stroll through the linguistic countryside. ‘One of my greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction,’ says Murnane, ‘has been to discover the endlessly varying shapes that a sentence may take.’ This leads us on a wonderful path full of philosophical sightseeing through the examinations on the varying shapes of reality. Within the world of The Plains, everything is pregnant with the potential for meaning like a clam nearly bursting open might or might not be so from a massive pearl inside. Yet, we may only be able to posit about the clam because, try as we might, the clam can never be opened. This is not cause for sadness or defeatism, but for joy as we can forever theorize and ponder what lies within. Art is a road paved in gold towards a destination of meaning that will forever be elusive but we can take endless comfort and satisfaction at the euphoric ‘vistas of vistas’ we pass along the way.
4.5/5
‘I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.’...more
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