The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane review - this is a careful, clever story told with a masterful hand

This was followed by a collection of short stories, The High Place. And now her new novel, The Sun Walks Down, employs a lost child trope as the foundation for exploring characters, attitudes, racism and oppression in pioneering Australia.

"A lost child is the thing white people are most afraid of. It's the one cost of settling on this country that they consider unreasonable."

This is a careful and clever novel. With a masterful hand, McFarlane laces together multiple points of view from a diverse range of voices, drawing together a complex but compelling narrative.

She segues between characters with ease, shifting from lost child to struggling landholder, despairing mother, policeman, Indigenous stockman, vicar, local teacher, policeman's new wife, Indigenous tracker, travelling foreign artist, prostitute, and more. This might sound overwhelming, but McFarlane inhabits her characters so convincingly that the reader can hear them thinking and see the world through their eyes.

The narrative takes place over seven days, commencing with a blanketing dust storm in which the child - Denny - becomes lost. The story then traces the search for him through a parched and rugged landscape. The storm "contributed to the long, slow erosion of the Flinders Ranges by picking up more dust from the kicked surfaces of the sheep and cattle stations, then pouring over the jagged rim of Wilpena Pound ... and on into the bristling wheat country."

This is thirsty, barren country where settlers were promised the moon in terms of productivity, but which was too dry for viable farming. People trying to live and farm here were hard, ambitious and ultimately disillusioned.

Through her close, perceptive examination of character, McFarlane brings us into the world of these people and forces us to critically examine their motivations and behaviour. She also shows us the world as a child might see it.

We move through the creative mind of an artist. She explores colonisation, sexism, racism, violence, fear, hope, loss, hardship, desire, displacement. We feel the heat: "The sky is bright as a burning field."

The Sun Walks Down is an excellent, layered work of literary historical fiction in which the author tackles many complex issues with elegance, assurance and searing intellectual insight.