From the ashes of grief

Surreal, wickedly funny, and brimming with pathos and awe, Flames, Robbie Arnott's debut novel, celebrates Tasmania and those who call it home. The narrative opens with siblings Levi and Charlotte McCallister in mourning. When their recently cremated mother reincarnates from the depths of Notley Fern Gorge covered in visages of the landscape, she promptly burns again outside the home of their estranged father. "This kind of thing" is apparently not "uncommon" for McCallister women, who often return after their cremations to see to unfinished business (1). As Levi watches his sister Charlotte descend into grief, he decides to do what he thinks is right: "I started looking for a coffin, and I swore to bury her whole and still and cold" (4). When Charlotte discovers his plans, however, she takes his gesture as a very good excuse to run as far from her brother as possible.

From the spark of the McCallister sibling conflict, Flames ignites into a wildfire spreading across the entire southern island. Each chapter switches to a new point of view, crafting a continuous plot much like a relay race—the torch passing from character to character but always moving forward. Charlotte's narrative recounts her fleeing south, eventually landing in Melaleuca at a wombat farm where the wombats are being mysteriously slaughtered in the night. She unknowingly meets the Esk God, a water rat who is in love with a cloud goddess. The Esk God's tale begins our acquaintance with a plethora of supernatural beings, and his death at the hands of the famous coffin maker Thurston Hough raises the stakes for Levi from human misunderstandings to divine trespass. Packed with colorful characters, the novel introduces a fisherman whose sacred bond with his seal is tragically severed but whose daughter will save Charlotte from herself, a hard-boiled alcoholic detective who uses her sex appeal to gather information for Levi, a murderously insane wombat farmer who makes a pact with a bird-spirit, and the McCallister father, who takes human form from fire when he falls in love. Playfully modulating across a variety of genres to capture each character's unique perspective and voice, the individual narratives are sufficiently enthralling to hold readers attentive.

Amid this large ensemble, Levi and Charlotte play out their grief and familial estrangement. Levi's descent into obsession and his need for complete emotional control pushes him to take greater and greater risks to make his sister's coffin and track her down. Meanwhile, Charlotte's emotional breakdown and inability to trust others turns dangerous after she starts to leak blue fire whenever distressed. Both siblings must learn balance—Levi through acknowledging his inner turmoil and Charlotte through controlling her explosive emotions. They both progress only when they allow others to help them. Inherent in the novel's thesis is the idea of interconnection. Every point of view comes together to paint a larger story that both is intimately focused on one family and also encompasses the story of Tasmania as a place. Not only are all these characters—human and divine—inescapably linked to each other, but they are part of the larger natural world.

Human incursion into nature lingers in the background of the book. Arnott acknowledges, though does not dwell on, the original inhabitants of Tasmania and the ways in which white settlers have pushed out the Aboriginal people and drastically altered the landscape. Humanity's confrontations with nature come to the foreground most visibly in Thurston Hough's fight against the Esk River inhabitants after murdering their god. The critique also emerges in subtler ways: the fall of tuna fishing, the pollution of the river, the careful grooming of beloved wombats only for the harvesting of their pelts. Arnott refuses to cast humanity as the irremediable villain of the story, however. Many of the characters are deeply embedded and connected to the landscape. The most grounded members of the ensemble are those who belong to the natural world: the fisherman who finds his peace with his seal, his daughter...