Charlie Wren hasn’t murdered anyone; in fact, he hasn’t done anything. This is the problem around which Kathleen Jennings’s Honeyeater revolves. All his life, Charlie has been plagued by disappearances among those in his social circles: first his childhood best friend, then, in the years since, countless housemates, acquaintances, and more. Now that another acquaintance, Alli, has gone missing, the police are, unsurprisingly, pretty interested in Charlie’s connection to her. Gowburgh, Australia, is a small city, and Bellworth a small suburb, so his slew of associations with the lost haven’t gone unnoticed—even if the incursions of strange, unnatural horrors  (hungry plants, walking constructs) have done.

Charlie’s sister is a councilwoman, and he is in her debt for keeping him out of trouble to date. In service to that debt, and rather than leaving town as he has long dreamed of doing, he moves into their recently deceased aunt’s house, which is full of memories of his childhood, to try to clear out the detritus of her long, long life. He tells himself that maybe all those missing friends and loved ones have all just left town. Maybe they’ve gone somewhere better, as he longs to do.

And so he just sort of … exists. In this town he wants to leave, in a house he never wanted to return to, in a life in which he is, at best, a passive participant. And this is not a story of him being broken out of that inactive rut, finding his drive and solving a great problem; Jennings is far more interesting in his predicament, which is both one of the great achievements of the story, and its one small weakness.

Against Charlie’s passivity come two opposing forces. First there’s Grace, who drags herself out of the creek seeking the family Wren but absent her memories or reasons for this urge. She’s not quite human, and this seems to be getting worse, but she desperately wants to live despite the roses that threaten to burst from beneath her eye and skin. Charlie wants, in his somewhat ineffectual way, to help her, but she resents him deeply for the ease with which he grasps the thing she most deeply craves.

There is also a young girl, never named as anything more than “the taxi driver’s daughter,” who initially has nothing pulling her into the Wren’s yard but her curiosity, some sort of undefined relationship with the Wrens’ deceased aunt, and a half-completed art project. Over the course of the story, however, her curiosity becomes a significant motive force, and her presence a critical factor for change to occur for the characters and for Bellworth itself. Her relationship with the place, with the power it seems to have, and with her own identity is fundamentally different from those of the adults around her.

And on yet a third side sits Charlie’s sister Cora. She seems everything he isn’t—a go-getter and a successful councilwoman, a big name in the town—but over the course of the narrative it becomes clear that she is just as rooted in place as Charlie is, if in a different way. They are both enclosed by their being Wrens, a narrative that is only ever reiterated and reinforced by them, never by the other characters. Yes, Grace is seeking them, but she never holds their Wren-ness up as important or defining in the way both the siblings do, each treating it as if it is somehow the whole of their self, the prophetic force that has defined their lives for good or for ill.

The bulk of the story, though, is a tension that pulls between Charlie and Grace. As they try to solve the mystery of her appearance and existence, they cannot quite trust one another to be on the same side, or to be exactly who they say they are, and are in equal parts confused and aggravated by their dissimilar approaches to problems. Their dynamic defies a lot of conventional labelling—not friends, not lovers, not rivals, but clearly bound together by some uneasy thread of something inherent to Bellworth. As they and an increasing cast around them are beset with strange events, odd creatures, and an ugly undercurrent of something growing, they must work together, to an extent, but never quite fill out the well-worn shape of the typical “unlikely allies.” While never hostile, they are too fundamentally opposed in their very natures to be able to align in any way that serves either of their best interests. And so much of the plot isn’t in the happening, in the experience of the supernatural and the dangerous, but instead in conversations between them that circle round and round, trying to find a way for these incompatible people and approaches to reach something even approaching functionality and forward motion.

However, all of this comes at a price for the novel: The absence of trust between them, when paired with Charlie’s passivity, leaves a fair section of the plot in the middle of the book soggy and slow, weighted down by no one being in a position to do anything themselves, each unwilling to take the risk of giving information to any of the people around them. The characters spend some pages going back and forth, once again stuck in the sort of rut that Charlie has been living in his whole life, constantly worrying away at the same problems. In itself, this isn’t really an issue—rather, it writes large the exact problem that forms the core of the story and of Charlie himself. But centring that Sisyphean futility does make the story lag. It all goes on just that little bit too long, undercutting what otherwise feels like such a tightly crafted novel. The circling the characters are doing simply tips over at some point into no longer feeling productive: not feeding into their characterisation, not adding to the sense of looming creep or giving any more texture or nuance to the feelings of powerlessness. Just… reiterating.

But the novel isn’t fatally flawed by these choices. Indeed, by the time the conclusion of the story comes around, this feeling of circularity feels like only a pause in the otherwise tight flow of the narrative.  It is a moment of doubt in the experience of this novel, where the whole edifice feels as though it teeters just a little on its grand foundation of inaction; but it rights itself so quickly that it would be easy to doubt that ever happened at all. And that ending-rightness almost seems to cast a new light on something that does feel like a problem, but with the hindsight of the rest of the book could be something else entirely.

Furthermore, outside of this niggle, there is a lot else to love. The very first, last, and constant impression Jennings gives in this book is one of loving attention on prose, which is here predominantly bent towards crafting a verdant, vegetal, and slightly putrescent atmosphere. She lingers on scents—flowering gum, jacaranda, damp vegetation—and on animals. The pages are full of the movements of birds and the shifting of branches, the flora and fauna consistently identified to provide a backdrop of heightened normality against which the unidentified forces pressing upon the story are more clearly visible. Both Charlie Wren and the narration recognise and can name the things around this small world: The neighbours, the places, the streets, and the houses are all name-checked over and over again, without explanatory context even as a nod to a reader unfamiliar with this invented city—and so those few things which lack this Linnean level of classificability stand out at the forefront. After all, when the supernatural appears directly on the page, it still cannot be explained: An unfinished scarecrow-like model may move of its own will, but there’s no sense of specific process underlying it.  The novel’s cataloguing of the natural, then, pins specificity to the page, and helps emphasise the discomfort engendered by the plot’s unknowable actors and unnatural forces.

While the rise in turn of whatever kind of being Grace might be, the strange invisible presences, and the walking creations all fall very much under this uncanny banner, it is a more mundane figure that stands out the most: the taxi driver’s daughter.

This brings me to the power of names and knowability in this novel. On the one side of the equation, we have Charlie Wren, his sister Cora, and their long familial history with Gowburgh and Bellworth. The family have been in the area for as long as it has been Bellworth, so they have always claimed. These two specifically have been here all their lives, and Charlie finds it impossible to leave a place where he is a known factor, as does his sister. As I’ve already suggested, they are both, in their very different ways, stagnated by their being known factors, and specifically by that Wren name: As they, and especially Cora, keep saying, they’re Wrens, as if that means something grander, more inevitable and fundamental than just a family association. On the other end of the novel’s naming spectrum there’s the taxi driver’s daughter who is never named at all. Of all of the characters in the book, it is she and Grace—who pulls herself out of the creek without an understanding of her being or identity, and names herself—who are most able to enact change and movement. This stands in stark contrast to Charlie’s disenfranchised passivity and Cora’s resolute unchangeability.

But it’s never quite that simple, because the power splits again—there is something potent in the Wren-ness after all, but so, too, in the taxi driver’s daughter’s relentless yearning to stay in this place and to become fixed and known. The problem isn’t classification, then, but stagnation, looping right back to the core conflict of action/inaction around which the story turns.

Honeyeater is a book whose initial power is in its atmosphere—that crafted, lush prose which immerses and even overwhelms the reader in a sense of this particular place—but whose lingering impression is much deeper. It is not the rotting smell of the creek that sits in my memory, but instead the seductive inertia of Charlie’s life, his inability to break out of an easy pattern that defines and confines him, and how the seeming successful career of his sister can represent and conceal just as much of the same problems. The novel’s overarching problem, and its character-level ones, are both tied into this idea of stagnation, of being stuck in a place and coming to believe in how the world defines you—of being limited by your definition of yourself, and by putting too great a stock in some idea of legacy and permanence of place. This is especially true somewhere like Australia—and where any supposed permanence is a thin veneer over the truth of all the characters’ existence in this world, and the shape it takes.

This seems like a considered contrast with the novel’s natural elements: This world, this city, and the idea of a family line being in a place “forever” sits in opposition to the natural world that predated them, and which reminds the reader (and indeed, at several points, some of the characters) that their presence here is not so permanent as they would like to claim. There is a very obvious hole in how the story talks about that permanence: Any time Cora talks about the family’s heritage being  rooted all the way in “the beginning,” either Charlie or the narration are quick to highlight that such permanence only begins at the foundation of the town as it is now. When, towards the end of the story, that heritage becomes linked with a violence that must consume, the story seems to me to gesture towards the colonial foundation at the root of the town. The emphasis both siblings place on their ancestry and their roles as fixtures of this place becomes all the darker, even if the nature of their inheritance is never fully named on the page.

Is it a weakness, though, to be so coy about one of the story’s focal points? Perhaps. But the more I consider Honeyeater, especially within the wider context of speculative literature being published and hyped at the moment, the more I wonder if that subtlety is … if not a benefit, then distinctly the lesser evil, and something of a contrast. So many of the hyped new releases feel desperate to explain their premises and their themes in clear, distinct, emphatically direct text, just in case the reader might miss it. In Honeyeater, Jennings is absolutely not following that approach. That the ideal might sit between what she’s given us and what is the seemingly dominant mode does not entirely dispel the relief I felt while having to grapple a little more with a text, and with having to wonder if the assumptions I made while reading did harmonise with what the author was giving me. That need to engage my brain, to draw those lines between description, character, and theme, felt like a more productive one than not to be trusted to find them at all.

There is, though, a line between this novel’s crafting first of its atmosphere then of its descriptive, sensory elements, and finally the direction of its themes. This interplay is why this is such an accomplished novel, in so many ways. Jennings steps beyond the vivid landscapes and unease of her previous novel, Flyaway (2020), and into something more singular. Every piece of it could be tied into its wider allusions, if the reader chooses to take the implications being laid down. For all the lack of direct pronouncement, that gesture towards colonialism, once considered, does feel rooted in the same soil that grows the story’s other interests: people and their relationships, with others and the world, the legacy of one’s own choices, and the heritage that forms the person. Every part has a function or a connection to another part of the story, and it feels so overwhelmingly considered that the initial hit of artful lightness it provides is all the more impressive. It is gothic all the way down to its vegetal heart, rooted in its place and deeply thoughtful about the power of that locality. And while it is not without flaw, that those flaws run counter to much of the current dominant mode of didacticism gives them an air of welcome relief. The book may itself be bogged down in the heat and stagnant rot of Gowburgh, but its approach is something of a metaphorical cool breeze.