What would Father do when he realised the man whose shadow he’d grown up in was living only an hour from us? Probably nothing. Father’s a placid man, not given to anger. I can’t imagine him wanting to confront or seek revenge. He’d probably have a faraway look for a few days, while pondering the proximity of our lives, and then make another pair of moccasins.
Finn predicts Father’s reaction to learning Winchester is alive and living not far away. But he’s wrong. In Father’s chapter he contemplates the possibility he should have spent his time better assassinating those who stood in the way of change. Then, when he believes Finn’s dead, he decides to kill Winchester.
Finn spots the scar on Father’s temple but doesn’t know its origin, and nor do we until the following chapter. It’s a relic of the fight between Dan and the unknown man, which is explained in Chapter 6. The past and the present are melding within their individual stories.
In BOB (the Bug Out Bag), Father places the book he’d taken from Everleigh. Finn has no idea of its significance. In this way their stories bump up against each other. Revealing Finn’s obliviousness to the horrors of Father’s past, and the difficulty Father has in coming to terms with them.
While Finn laments the lack of photographs to document his childhood, he and Father repeat phrases from his childhood, such as on page 55 That was a long tell to denote a long story. And observing that echidnas have their feet on backwards. Or singing ‘Happy Birthday to me!’ whenever the fire is lit. Father uses his favourite tools – words, to paste over the gaps.
Finn gets stoned. The night before he’d been drunk for the first time. He believes his father would not have approved. In the previous chapter Father had sat under the mulberry tree and commemorated Hog with a joint of his own. They’ve spent 22 years together and yet there is so much they do not know of each other.
Finn ‘places words in the order Father gave them.’ Because he had no personal experience and every now and then he puts a word in the wrong context, or exchanges a noun for an adjective. Their ‘voice’ is similar, but as it’s the only one Finn has ever known he’s not developed his own.
Finn, feels resentful of subsistence living and of the people who created the conditions in which his life is the only one possible. He uses his dissatisfaction to become a pioneer, setting up trade between two settlements separated by danger and distance – what had once been only an hours fossil-fueled journey apart.
Artemis is found with the frayed rope around her neck, she’s likely to have been raised for food. Finn had killed and eaten a wild dog. Dogs are on the menu. It’s a prelude to a situation in Chapter 33 where the order is reversed. We’re no longer necessarily the peak predator.
Finn enters Hobart with a storybook concept of how things happen. His experience of life has been lived mostly through them. He does the same thing on his return journey, he recounts the stories of his childhood and works them through his narrative. As he does he releases his childhood. Another rebirth in a series, physical, social and psychological.
Finn watches Eamon being attacked, and Artemis attacks one of the Cartwright Boys and kills him, before being, killed herself. He watches helplessly from the room above the bookshop. This is a mirror of Father’s interaction with Everleigh Blandell-Collins. Neither of them act violently towards anyone, yet nor do they save them, self-preservation wins out. Both acquire a guilt debt that cannot be assuaged.
