Robbie Arnott – Flames (2018) Review

8.5/10

Flames (2018) is an Australian magical realist/fantasy novel by Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott. Also set on Tasmania, Flames evokes and pays homage to the mythology of Aboriginal Tasmanians in its fantasy elements, and celebrates humanity’s intimate and mystical connection to nature. Flames is Arnott’s first novel, giving him literary award nominations at a young age and was made part of the school curriculum in Victoria state. It is also very good.

There is no clear, delineated story in this novel. Each chapter is named after an element (ash, salt, sky, iron, fur…) and follows a character with a connection to that element. Yet, each chapter is connected to the previous one and so weaves a story through a sideways movement from character to character. For example, and this will also illustrate the type of fantasy that this novel dabbles in… 

The first chapter is about the McAllister family, and many of the women in this family return to the living world after cremation, but they return in bodies of soil, plants, rocks, salty sea muck. Their brother decides that this has to end and starts building a coffin for his sister so that she doesn’t get cremated, because there seems to be some connection to flames with the women in this family. The second chapter is about a tuna hunter who has bonded with a seal as a soul mate and as hunting partner. After orcas murdered his seal partner, he retired and decided to help out a young man who is looking for wood to build a coffin. The third chapter is about the girl Charlotte who runs away from home after she discovers that her brother is building a coffin for her, and sleeps as a runaway under an upturned boat together with a water rat who joins her. The fourth chapter is about the water rat who is actually the embodied river god of the South Esk River and is searching for his love, the cloud god. And so on. Each chapter adds a new perspective and moves the story a bit forward.

If there is a main character it is Charlotte, or perhaps her and her brother Levi both, because all the chapters concern their stories one way or another. Their stories resolve themselves in a new kind of mythological tale about rivers, sea and fire which feels a bit abstract and, I’m afraid, a bit superficial. If there are any deeper interpretations to peel from this, one would have to pry them out. But the stories also end with some touching personal moments that show the wonder of a personal connection to nature, and I think Arnott wanted to pursue that idea above anything else. 

Arnott’s prose is gorgeous. His descriptions of nature are incredibly vibrant, evoking deep historical ties between humans and the land, and luxuriating in the beauty of the wind, the rivers and the sea. Each chapter accentuates that connection between humans and nature, and the connection is made explicit through hints of mythology. A recurring theme is pollution and the loss of the grandeur of nature. Arnott’s writing style is supple and graceful with steady pacing and the occasional beautiful turn of phrase. A curious choice is to display all the dialogue in italics, and the effect that has is as if the dialogue is just an addition to a style of storytelling that feels closer to an oral tradition.

But then again, Arnott plays with form a lot. There is an epistolary chapter, a noir mystery chapter, a gothic horror chapter on a wombat farm and much more, and some of it is comedic in tone. The odd connections between chapters are surprising and makes one wonder where the story is going and whether it might all coalesce into a whole. 

But I also felt that the variety of form and tone undermined the effort of creating a thematically strong narrative. The theme of connection to nature wasn’t anchored by a clear emotional tone because it got watered down in a confusion of tones. But I may be criticising the novel for what it didn’t do, and never promised to do in the first place. The theme still exists, and is addressed in many forms in all these wonderful, varied chapters, and I guess that that was the intention: exploring the connection to nature from different angles. But if the intention was also to create a powerful fantasy novel of personal connection, of reintegration, then it fell short in that regard. As it stands, this was still a rejuvenating novel for me. Highly entertaining and stimulating.