TITLE: Flyaway
AUTHOR: Kathleen Jennings
176 pages, Tor.com Publishing, ISBN 9781250260499 (hardcover, ebook, audio)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers―a note that makes her question memories of their disappearance and her father’s departure.
A beguiling story that proves that gothic delights and uncanny family horror can live―and even thrive―under a burning sun, Flyaway introduces readers to Bettina Scott, whose search for the truth throws her into tales of eerie dogs, vanished schools, cursed monsters, and enchanted bottles. Flyaway enchants you with the sly, beautiful darkness of Karen Russell and a world utterly its own.
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Kathleen Jennings’ Flyaway is a rural fantasy fever-dream. Like the main character herself, for most of the book I was never completely sure what was real and what was imagined or exaggerated. Jennings sets small-town insular inter-family dynamics against the power of storytelling; waves of present and past, mundane and supernatural roil against each other to create an intensely disconcerting experience.
In the urban fantasy genre, the city setting is as much a character as the humans who populate it. Jennings’ outback-bordering Inglewild District (comprised of the towns of Runagate, Carter’s Crossing, and Woodwild) is as far from urban or even suburban as one can get. The harshness of the surrounding land and the towns’ struggles to exist within it (one of which is largely lost before the main events of the novella) informs every page. There’s never a doubt that this remote settlement has been forgotten by the rest of Australia. If these towns could talk, what would they have to say about themselves and their siblings? I think if anyone could pull off a novella narrated by three struggling, nearly-dead remote towns, Jennings could.
I also wonder about the name “Runagate.” At first I read it as “run agate” – maybe it was known for a quarry of that type of rock, dug up and transported (“run”) away – but then I started thinking of it as “run a gate” – every time a character encounters a closed gate blocking them from someplace/something dangerous, they bull their way through to occasionally disastrous results. The name can’t be a coincidence.
The District’s character is reflected in the residents. They are all practical, within the bounds of their personalities, except when the landscape and past events have taken their toll. Several characters suffer from personality disorders that leave them outside societal norms, and it seems that Bettina Scott, our narrator and main character, may be one of them. From the very beginning, Bettina seems uncomfortable in her own skin: she’s trying to be the proper young woman her mother has raised her to be, as her thoughts during her prim and proper interactions with a local homeless man, a shop-owner, and a former school friend show. But there are obvious memory gaps regarding her teen years, especially surrounding the disappearance of her father and departure of her older brothers from the family home. How Bettina currently presents herself (subdued, polite, never acknowledging the nicknames (“Tina,” “Tink”) others call her by) is clearly at odds with what her former friends remember of her, and before long Bettina begins to question which is her true self: modest behaving daughter or wild risk-taking friend? This dysphoria – what her mother expects her to be versus who she really is, what she remembers of the night her father left versus what really happened – permeates every moment of the story. Bettina is our narrator so everything, even the stories told to her by other characters, is filtered through her internalized sense that something isn’t right – or rather, that something is very, very wrong. This adds to the novella’s dreamlike quality, as Bettina stumbles her way through the events of the early chapters almost half-awake or sometimes less so. There are at least two instances where she dissociates and “loses time,” wondering how long she’s actually been standing where she’s standing. What exactly happens during these moments, and how long they last, is left for the reader and Bettina to piece together since there is no outside narrator to fill us in on the things Bettina herself can’t, or won’t, remember. We can get some small inkling through how the other characters react to Bettina after one of these episodes, but until Bettina is able to regain her memory, those moments are lost to both the character and the reader.
Dreams, especially those we experience when we’re ill, often take turns into completely disconnected and unexpected territory. Flyaway does the same thing several times, action halting for a side story that feels disconnected from everything around it. But Flyaway isn’t a dream, it’s a carefully layered construction. Each of the side-stories is a complete whole – any one of them could be published as a satisfyingly eerie stand-alone short story, an impressive feat in a book that is already economical in length – but everything comes together at the end. It’s through the digressions that the reader is able to piece together connections the characters can’t, or sometimes willfully don’t, make. And they are placed skillfully so that the reader’s suspense is as great, if not greater, than the characters’.
I devoured Flyaway in one sitting and re-read it almost immediately just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. The second time around I picked up on another bit of word-play: the Damson family, as represented by current eldest child Gary (a former friend of Tina’s and still concerned about her), are the ones who build and mend fences; their role is stated several times as making sure everyone else knows their place without taking sides in any conflict. The Damsons, if not Gary himself, seem to be as aware of the supernatural aspect of the Inglewild District as anyone else, and so it seems their job is also to inhibit the flow of humans into the wild – one might say their job is to build a dam separating human and supernatural. I’m pretty sure future re-readings will reveal more small connections like that.
Note: I received an e-ARC of Flyaway from Tor.com via NetGalley. The book actually releases on July 28, 2020.