Kathleen Jennings is an Australian illustrator with an interesting blog. I can’t remember where I first saw her work, but I do remember seeing a warm recommendation of Flyaway, her first novel, from Terri Windling. Without bothering to find out anything about it, I spent my Christmas book token on a copy and settled down to read it by the stove, one icy evening.
Our narrator is Bettina Scott, aged nineteen, living with her mother Nerida in the prettiest and tidiest house in Runagate, a small Australian town in a district ‘somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere’. Despite Nerida’s careful homemaking and tender pruning of Bettina into a model of 1950s girlhood decades too late, all is not quite perfect in the Scott household since Bettina’s ‘mocking father and unloving brothers’ vanished three years previously. Bettina is busy ‘scrubbing out a little more, too, of that old childish self – the restless temper, the loose-limbed insolence’, almost but not entirely successfully. Sometimes a lie escapes. Sometimes she has a nip of the cooking brandy.
Beyond the lattice of roads, paddocks and houses, the land around Runagate has ‘a fragile beauty’ which gets ‘into your bones, into your veins’. It is a land of ‘hills and scrub’, ‘purple shadows’ and tough trees: ‘Bottle and box, paper and iron, thorned and blossomed under the unutterable light [...] Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones’. It is a haunted landscape: ‘Memory seeped and frayed there’. It is beautiful but dangerous. People vanish into the landscape, just disappear. Bettina’s family are not the only ones.
Two strangers are seen in town and someone paints the word ‘monsters’ on the Scotts’ fence. Believing that the strangers are her brothers, returned, Bettina and two of her former schoolfriends, Gary and Trish, follows them, a small quest with a Tupperware box of sandwiches. (Trish’s mother vanished too, years ago. And so did Gary’s uncle.)
It’s a short book, complex, thorny and tangled as the lantern bush that engulfs the village school at Woodwild. I read in a state of constant fear, yet enjoying the rich and evocative prose. Bettina’s repressed and partial narrative is interwoven with stories about other disappearances and explain them in terms of magic and monstrosity, borrowing motifs from folk lore and fairy tale. The further into the bush the three companions go, the more threatening the landscape becomes. The stories are chilling: a shape-shifting megarrity which will take your place at the dinner table, a wolfish Pied Piper, a bone horse. What do these stories mean? What kernel do they transform? Fantasy and reality become so deeply entwined there is no separating them any more (perhaps just a bit too confusing, ultimately?).
Far too creepy to read on your own at night, you will enjoy this in daylight if you like the work of Kelly Link, Zoe Gilbert or Angela Carter. But really, it is unlike anything I have ever read: an eerie song to the power of land and story.
(Kathleen Jennings, Into the Woods, silhouette; from her portfolio here)