Firelight

FIRELIGHT
John Morrissey
Text Publishing

REVIEWED BY JESSIE NEILSON

John Morrissey is a Melbourne-based writer of Kalkadoon descent, who has previously earned the Boundless Indigenous Writer's Prize. Firelight comprises seven short stories with elements of realism, magical realism, and science fiction.

‘‘Firelight’’ is not the name of any story but rather an overarching idea of the raw elements, shades of colour, light, and truth darting in and out of focus, and of communal storytelling and listening in the outdoors.

Common concerns are the dangerous trumping of nature, the encroachment of the artificial through new technology, and the loss of the worth of an individual. Alongside the last is the disappearance of culture, stories, and other elements which bind together a community. Some stories are primarily set in a contemporary Australia, while the majority flit through time and dimensions with shapeshifting identities.

Even with fantastical elements it is a distinctly Australian landscape running through. The evocative lantana is a motif, as is ivy. In various stories these wild plants spread and furl, replicating and hiding the unknown. In ‘‘Ivy’’, for example, an insomniac wanders the night-time city surrounds, drawn towards the undergrowth yet threatened by it as well. The vegetation is overbearing: he witnesses it as if feeding on the moonlight, and likewise tracking patterns across his hands and the sky in a ‘‘luminous arabesque’’. Reality and dreamworlds blend, and in these stories one cannot pinpoint what is happening and in what time-place sequence, and what may be the creation of an over-working mind.

These stories seem magical and unusual, and sometimes are frustratingly open-ended or hard to pin down. The most lengthy, ‘‘Autoc’’, tells of young Shah in Melbourne in the present day, but it expands, taking her through centuries for the lost wisdom of the Autoc people. What exactly is going on is unclear, and it feels disjointed. Yet there are once again strong forces at play, and a huge imagination, where ghostly figures pass by in procession under the ‘‘decayed face of the moon’’. Settings in all stories are vivid and alive, people but secondary players.

Morrissey's work haunts. Other forces look ready to destroy Earth, whether they be centipede-like aliens arriving for long-buried weapons, iron ore company magnates and their ‘‘minerals research’’, or scientists developing hybrid species. We see both the compassionate side of people and the very worst. Some are chasing after some kind of Atlantis, but it seems that humankind will always stand in its own way.

Grasping these stories is challenging but rewarding. Morrissey's is a disturbing, Bosch-like vision of an incomprehensible world, a vast scape which pulses, alternately inflating and shrinking. Humans seem but pawns in this scheme, a lesson, perhaps, to leave nature well alone.

Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant