Annah Faulkner’s Last Day follows The Beloved in family theme

The author does not stray far from her debut, but there are questions left unanswered in her second outing.

The resolution of Annah Faulkner’s second novel is ‘deeply felt, poetic even’. Picture: Richard Waugh

Annah Faulkner’s debut novel — the Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Beloved — was a coming-of-age story set in New Guinea. At its centre was Roberta Lightfoot, a polio victim who yearned to express herself through art. Roberta’s desires brought her into conflict with her mother and threatened to expose long-held family secrets, and in this The Beloved trod fairly familiar ground. What set the novel apart was the radiance of its setting and the ingenious way Faulkner used colour, furnishing Roberta with an ability to read emotions in the colours that bled out of the people around her.

In her second novel, Last Day in the Dynamite Factory, the Queensland author doesn’t stray too far from her debut. She offers us the same themes — deceit and family breakdown — and another individual struggling to find themselves amid the chaos. She even gives us characters from The Beloved, bringing Chris and Diane (schoolfriends of Roberta’s) centrestage, while assigning Roberta a pivotal supporting role. Yet where The Beloved was a poised and inventive novel, Last Day in the Dynamite Factory is a somewhat confused and less inspired effort.

Chris’s aunt Jo has just died. Jo and her husband, Ben, have cared for Chris since he was a small boy, and standing to give an eulogy, Chris finds himself unable to speak. It’s a recurring affliction — one that manifests in times of stress — and it has its origins in a beach outing where Chris’s cousin Liam (Ben and Jo’s son) drowned.

Jo’s death underlines Chris’s unhappiness. He’s fed up with his work as a conservation ­architect and wonders what happened to his ambition to be a cabinet-maker. His children are asserting their independence before he is ready to let them go. And he longs for a more emotionally intimate connection with Diane, who seems unable, even after 25 years of ­marriage, to open herself up fully to him: “He can drench himself in Diane but his soul remains dry.”

Things come to a head when Chris discovers — in one of his aunt’s journals — the truth about his father’s identity. Over the years, Chris has sporadically searched for Jack Ward, the man he believed was his father, but without success. The revelation that Ben and Jo have lied to Chris about the facts of his birth impels him to seek out the full story.

This unravelling of family secrets prompts Chris to step back from his work as well as his marriage, and he escapes to the beach where his cousin died. It’s there that Chris runs into Roberta, an encounter that sharpens his regret about the course of his life. It’s also Roberta who clarifies for Chris the importance of embracing the past, in all its light and shade — a lesson he has gleaned from his conservation work but has been unable to apply to his relationships.

The close detail of Last Day in the Dynamite Factory is elegantly crafted: “Chris glances at [Diane’s] reflection … Not a single thing he could complain about, yet something inside him rises up, then flattens out again, like a lone wave on the sea.” However, there is an unsteadiness to the plotting that erodes the novel’s ­credibility.

While Chris is dealing with the immediate aftershock of reading his aunt’s journal, the novel works well. But from the moment Chris again meets Roberta, it struggles to find its way. It almost feels as though Faulkner is endeavouring to bring things towards a predetermined ending, without being quite sure how to get there.

The impetus of this novel relies on characters withholding information from each other, but their motivation for doing so is not always convincing. Why Ben and Jo would maintain their silence about his father once Chris is a grown man is hard to fathom; so too why they disclosed so little about his mother.

There are too many unanswered questions here, too many inconsistencies that detract from the reading experience. Why do we learn Chris has been haunted by memories of Roberta only when he meets her again about a third of the way into the novel? Why hasn’t Chris discovered the story of his mother’s life and death before this, given any search for his father would logically have started with her? And why does the fragment of backstory that explains the novel’s title fail to resonate in any telling way with Chris’s predicament?

The novel’s resolution is deeply felt, poetic even, and Faulkner makes solid use of Chris’s conservation work as the metaphorical underpinning of his dilemma. In Fletcher (the cartoon-like doodle that peoples Chris’s drawings and notes, and speaks the words he finds himself unable to say) she tries to recapture something of the charm of Roberta’s colours, but the effort is half-hearted and nowhere near as effective.

There’s the sense here that Faulkner, like many authors before her, has succumbed to second-novel syndrome. Last Day in the Dynamite Factory is a likable, if unexceptional novel — one that seems to be have been forced, rather than fired into being.

Diane Stubbings is a Melbourne-based writer and critic.

Last Day in the Dynamite Factory

By Annah Faulkner

Picador, 327pp, $32.99