In March 1999, twenty-seven-year-old James Harper, a shy public servant living in Canberra, is called to a police station to provide evidence on the suicide of his youngest sister nine years earlier. As the investigation gets underway, James confesses that he had been abused by his stepfather, Martin Jenkins, when he was a child. Could the two events be connected? But as he dives headfirst into the legal system in a quest for justice, James must face some disturbing truths about himself and the past he thought he had left behind.
Part crime drama, part coming-of-age tale, part modern psychological odyssey, Oakman's novel is a gripping, unsettling and powerful story about self-discovery, the importance of friendship and the transcendent power of words. Fire in the Head addresses a deep taboo in Australian society - the legacy of child sexual abuse and what victims must endure to bring perpetrators to justice.
In March 1999, twenty-seven-year-old James Harper, a shy public servant living in Canberra, is called to a police station to provide evidence on the suicide of his youngest sister nine years earlier. As the investigation gets underway, James confesses that he had been abused by his stepfather, Martin Jenkins, when he was a child. Could the two events be connected? But as he dives headfirst into the legal system in a quest for justice, James must face some disturbing truths about himself and the past he thought he had left behind.
Part crime drama, part coming-of-age tale, part modern psychological odyssey, Oakman's novel is a gripping, unsettling and powerful story about self-discovery, the importance of friendship and the transcendent power of words. Fire in the Head addresses a deep taboo in Australian society - the legacy of child sexual abuse and what victims must endure to bring perpetrators to justice.
IS THIS HOW it ends?
Cupped hands protect a tiny flame from the breeze as it ignites a piece of cloth. Cupped hands – your hands. A line of fire skitters along the ground towards a weatherboard cottage, high set, surrounded by bush. The flame reaches the wall, splices in two and quickly encircles the building. Ethanol-soaked towels laid at the doorways and windows guard the exits.
Nagging doubts had stopped you until tonight. What would happen when the smoke penetrated the house? Would the occupants wake and, in their panic, manage to escape? Or would they be silently overcome? Who else might be inside? Those questions are dead now and you cannot remember feeling so alive. Your heart is steady, resolute.
Last night, you drove along the road searching for a spot to stash your gear. A steep embankment where a drain passes under the road – a spot no one would ever find. A sharp-eyed walker might catch sight of the red canisters and the white material. But no one walked up here anymore. Into the opening you pushed the bag, bulging with towels and bed sheets, cut into strips and tied together to make a twenty-metre wick. Then the fuel: ethanol, not petrol.
Remember the time you found a bullet, when you were a boy? Put it inside a model battleship, doused with lawnmower fuel. Shaking hands struck the match, igniting the vapour first, not the fluid. That second inside the blue fireball was enough to cement the lesson: you needed a safer option – a slow and stable burn. The night comes, warm and moonless. You haven’t slept much when the alarm sounds at three in the morning. Statistically, it’s when people are most likely to be lost in dreams. Between two and four; you split the difference. Deep in the forest, you find another spot to hide the car, unscrew the plates and head back on foot. You have a bivvy bag, water, and a little food in your backpack. The plan: run six kilometres, sleep until dawn, walk to the station and catch the early train into town, catch a flick, keep the receipts, collect the car next night. The plan is solid, you reckon. But foolproof? Well, what is?
You watch for as long as you can ignore the urge to flee, until flames have licked their way into the ceiling cavity and smoke pours from between the roof tiles. Time to go. You step carefully down the hill without using a torch to a little-used track that separates the private land from state forest. Now you run. Each stride an escape. Steal a backward glance – just one. Yellow, orange, and red fingers lash the canopy of trees above the house, a blue flash where the fire is most intense. Heat reaches your face, even at this distance. You gasp at the beauty, the wordless poetry, the answer to the question no one asks.
Daniel Oakman's novel 'Fire in the Head' begins with an epigraph from German writer Christa Wolf's paraphrasing of William Faulkner: ‘What is past is not dead; it is not even past.’ We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers. The words make for more than just a foreshadowing for what's to come in the subsequent pages -- they are brought to life in an intensely reeling portrait pulsating way beyond the point where the story ends.
On the surface, the book is a crime-thriller undulating slow and careful around its protagonist James Harper who lives in Canberra and is called in by the police to provide evidence regarding the suicide of his younger sister. At its core, Oakman's novel is a gripping examination of the complexities of growing up with trauma and the different guises it can take in one's past as well as present.
Logging at just short of 300 pages, the book is divided into four parts, offering incredibly readable prose that uncoils in an impressive, if disconcerting, mix of revelations and introspection. While broaching the painful reality of child sexual abuse, the writer unpacks through James its nightmarish aftermath, both physical and mental, and how it lingers in thought and action, despite and in spite of its emotional repression.
The literary choice of alternating frequently between first- and second-person voices, sometimes even within the span of a few paragraphs, comes off as a little jarring initially but ends up effectively bolstering the conflict and disharmony raging within James. While most of the text explores the story through his perspective, the last few pages lend a brief peek into the psyche of both the direct and indirect perpetrators of the events, driving home the disturbing ambiguity of morality and its, often detrimentally, individualistic nature.
Oakman's novel, thus, is an intense venture which begins with giving off the impression of a whodunnit saga but unravels into a psychological deep dive into the unsettling, one which I would highly recommend.