Levi

Levi is the protective and normally polite older brother of 23-year-old Charlotte, who becomes disturbed at the behaviour of his sister after their mother’s death. Motivated by his love for Charlotte and his innate tendencies toward duty and purpose, inherited from his estranged father, Levi takes matters into his own hands and searches for a coffin in which to bury Charlotte so she won’t return like their mother. Levi’s need to spare Charlotte from cremation and reincarnation becomes an obsession after he comes into possession of a pelt that had belonged to a river god, and he is no longer able to see reason. Levi’s mental clarity returns with the pelt’s destruction and, by the end of the novel, he is restoring his relationship with Charlotte and experiencing the start of a renewed sense of purpose.

Levi Quotes

I started looking for a coffin, and I swore to bury her whole and still and cold. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 1

Like his private-school manners were paved over something that had cracked. (the detective about Levi) Chapter 6

A thin, jittery and softly spoken young man, he told the constable everything he knew in a dispassionate and polite matter, all while paying me the utmost respect. (Mavis about Levi, about Thurston) Chapter 8

… he loved her more than he could ever show with words; … the coffin represented … this. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 11

Levi is not well. Levi is not realising: he could have just spoken to her. In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words. (about Charlotte) Chapter 11

‘Your sister will come home, eventually, and you need to be reliable. Strong. The brother you normally are.’ (Jack to Levi). Chapter 11

…he does not care about the man, not about who he is or what he says or where he goes, because at the mention of his mother he has stopped caring about almost everything … (Levi about his father) Chapter 11

All that his son had inherited from him was his love of purpose and his strength of resolve. (Jack about Levi) Chapter 12

I have nothing to forgive. I have only trust to win back. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 15

Charlotte

Charlotte is the hot-tempered 23-year-old younger sister of Levi, who is grieving the death of her mother and coming to terms with her own destiny as a McAllister woman: to die and then return. Charlotte has a tendency to leak fire, an unlikely inheritance from her estranged father, whom she distrusts. Her relationship with her brother is tense; she runs away from him upon discovering his intentions about the coffin. In Melaleuca, caring for wombats, she finds the peace and calming effect of nature. But when a mass death of the wombats occurs, Charlotte’s fire leaks uncontrollably and it is only the other farmhand, Nicola, who can stop her flames. Their shared experiences bring them into a romantic relationship. By the end of the novel, Charlotte is learning to manage her fire, and an understanding between her and Levi is starting to develop.

Charlotte Quotes

Charlotte will burn, tomorrow or in half a century, but she will burn. Chapter 3

She does not trust her father. (Charlotte) Chapter 3

Their mother was dead. What does it matter what form or sound her grief takes? (Charlotte) Chapter 3

… as she yelled, a blue light began leaking from her eyes. (Allen about Charlotte) Chapter 7

Charlotte’s eyes would not drift from the ground or sky. It was as if she was trying to blend in with the fields and snow. Chapter 10

Even when Charlotte grew into a loud, hard-to-handle blur of a child, he could feel nothing but love. (Jack, about Charlotte) Chapter 12

Levi and I have never understood each other. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

But I know that between us there is love. … Love built with his stubborn resolve, with my hot temper, with all the care our mother poured into us. (Charlotte about Levi) Chapter 13

I am a coast person. I don’t like being hemmed by these trees. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

The Detective

A gin-drinking, feel-nothing, unnamed by the author, private detective who Levi hires to track down Charlotte, ‘the detective’ knows how to find the right people to answer her questions, including her ex-husband, Senior Detective Malik, with whom she shares an easy relationship. The detective’s tough exterior and dislike of pretty things hides a person who has been hurt too many times, and as Charlotte discerns, is lonely. She helps a badly burned Nicola when Charlotte’s fire causes a major bush fire, revealing a caring nature.

The Detective Quotes

You shouldn’t drink gin before you drive a sedan. But you also shouldn’t talk back to your mother, wear black with blue or sleep with loose men, and I’d done all those things plenty of times … (the detective) Chapter 6

It sure was pretty, all that light on all that water. I’m not interested in pretty things. (the detective) Chapter 6

Skinny boy’s mother and all her twice-dead relatives didn’t make me blink. (the detective) Chapter 6

I don’t feel much at all. (the detective) Chapter 6

I’m not the best detective in the world, but I know how to find the right people to answer my questions. (the detective) Chapter 6

And out of this set of ill-chosen clothes poked the neck and head of a woman. (the detective) Chapter 10

‘You girls got any gin?’ (the detective) Chapter 10

The flames of rage and loneliness that burn through her smirk; flames that can’t be put out. She is just like me. (Charlotte, about the detective) Chapter 13

Karl

Fisherman Karl hunted legendary Oneblood Tuna with his seal partner for a decade until one day, three orcas tore his partner’s life from him in front of Karl’s eyes. Karl is haunted by the experience and has never been able to move on from his loss, hearing the underwater clicks of the orcas even in the midst of life lived from within a loving family. The novel closes with Karl taking Levi out on a dinghy to befriend a seal, leaving the reader to speculate that, like Levi, Karl may also find a new purpose that will enable him to move beyond his grief.

Karl Quotes

Sometimes he chased a tuna for twenty or thirty metres, but always broke off and returned to Karl, a doggish smile hanging from his whiskers. (Karl’s seal) Chapter 2

His other half lay sleeping beside him. (Karl and his seal after their first Oneblood kill) Chapter 2

They took turns gripping its tail in their teeth and flinging their heads left to right, over and over again, using the hard lid of the ocean to break Karl’s seal into ragged chunks of brown-red meat. (the orcas) Chapter 2

Soon the clicks would stop, and he would stop hearing his seal hit the sea, and an idea or direction or purpose would swim up at him. (Karl) Chapter 2

The Esk God

The Esk God is a river god who takes the physical form of a native water rat, or rakali, who warms himself by snuggling up to Charlotte the night she runs away. The god is all-knowing and has existed in spirit form for centuries, having witnessed the colonisation of Tasmania and the effects of human industry on its land and waterways, learning to temper his anger at humanity’s destructive ways in subtle ways, such as nipping screws out of jet skis. The Esk God has respect for other land and water gods but is in love with the Cloud God, to whom he owes his entire existence. When the Esk God thinks he is just about to meet the Cloud God, his invincibility gives out when he stops out of his river domain and onto land and is caught and killed for his pelt.

The Esk God Quotes

He had been here longer than the loud pale apes, longer even than the quieter dark ones who had arrived earlier. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

He had learned the colour and the shape of their callousness, but he could not stop them, for his power was limited to the rivers, while they swamped over everything. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

Without the Cloud God where would be no Esk rivers, and without the rivers there would be no Esk God. Chapter 4

He was wise enough to know that his fury would not help the river or stop the apes, so he continued on, soothing his rage in a simple, humbly way – by nipping screws out of the hull of an idle jetski. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

But the Esk God remained, and the Esk God thrived, for who could kill a river? Chapter 4

The Cloud God would be waiting for him, high on the peaks and plateaus where she poured her sky water down the slopes and into his rivery veins. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

Edith McAllister

Mother of Levi and Charlotte, Edith is cremated then returns to life to confront her husband Jack one last time. Edith comes from a long line of McAllister women who tend to reincarnate. She was the parent who taught the children to love each other and to appreciate nature, spending enjoyable time with them in the forest and by the beach. Her marriage with Jack breaks down and she banishes him from their lives upon learning that he had used his supernatural ability to manipulate her in the initial stages of their relationship.

Edith McAllister Quotes

Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge. (Levi) Chapter 1

She was definitely our mother – but, at the same time, she was not our mother at all. (Levi) Chapter 1

When she’d wandered back into her living room she immediately started shedding sheets of paperbark all over the carpet, while an ornate crown of bluegum branches burst from her head and the furred tail of a Bennett’s wallaby flopped out from beneath her dress. (Levi, about his great-aunt Margaret’s reincarnation) Chapter 1

It’s where his mother would sit quietly at the end of most days. (Levi, about the beach) Chapter 11

Jack McAllister / Fire

Fire’s physical journey with humans is tracked through time from its conception with the rubbing together of stones to the present time. Fire is portrayed supernaturally, as being able to enjoy its usefulness to humanity and, eventually, in desiring human contact. Fire conjures itself into human form and exists as an Indigenous man for a time, but he is never able to fully relate to people because of his incapacity for emotion. He experiences racism at the hands of white men, and witnesses them hunting down Indigenous people but doesn’t help, choosing instead to embrace the many purposes white man has for him.

Jack is a physical form that fire takes when he falls in love with Edith McAllister. Having made it his purpose to make her love him, Jack ignites a spark in Edith’s mind and manipulates her into falling in love with him. He takes Edith’s surname and becomes a part of the town, looking ordinary and acting normal, but is still able to light sparks in the minds of people who would want to investigate him too deeply, and still able to change form. As a father and husband, Jack grows in his purpose to love, developing kindness and care and devotion. Jack is so devoted to his daughter, that his fire spills over into an inheritance he had not intended. He doesn’t realise that the distance in his relationship with Levi is because they are more alike than different. Jack is deeply saddened when Edith makes him leave and he tries to stay on the periphery of the children’s lives but they are suspicious and distrusting of him. Jack’s continued love for his family is seen in his difficulty cremating Edith, his grappling with whether or not she has forgiven him when she returns to confront him, and in the sad-eyed smile he gives Charlotte when the monster storm is unleashed that reduces him to a muddy puddle.

Realistically, fire, including in his Jack form, is afraid of water.

Jack McAllister / Fire Quotes

‘… They just say he looks ordinary, acts normal, and that they can’t imagine why a policeman would be interested in him. Then their eyes glaze over and they start talking about the footy or the weather’. (Malik to the detective about Jack) Chapter 6

These eyes – shifting, unknowable points of whiteness and iris and heat – froze me to the ground. (the detective about Jack) Chapter 6

The sight of his shrinking back, changing colour and shape before my eyes from this distance, drew a curtain of exhaustion over me. (the detective) Chapter 6

It’s where his father would not come, not past the gully edge, for he was afraid of the ocean. (Levi about the beach) Chapter 11

At the sight of the sea he flickered with fear, but the water stayed where it was, and after a while he discovered that as long as nobody introduced them to each other he was safe. (Fire) Chapter 12

It was people, always people; only people that he really cared for. (Fire) Chapter 12

He had helped them took, create, shape and heat themselves, and had come to think of them as not so much a family but as part of himself. (Fire) Chapter 12

For of all the shapes of life he had encountered, they were the only ones who had shown him that he had purpose in this water-edged world. (Fire) Chapter 12

Though he liked people … he couldn’t relate to their problems. He couldn’t know their love and pain and hate and joy. (Fire) Chapter 12

And he couldn’t stay with any group of them for a long time, because he did not age. (Fire) Chapter 12

It was far easier to watch from the coals, to help them with the flames, and be around them but not with them. And besides: it was more fun to be fire. Chapter 12

It had something to do with attraction, he knew, and kindness and care and devotion. A true kind of love was in itself a version of what he knew best: it was a purpose. (Fire, as Jack) Chapter 12

This love had grown between them, hard and fast, and the strength of the feeling was so strong it sometimes had him spurting fire from his eyes and nose and fingertips, fire he would quickly slap dead before Edith noticed anything. (Fire, as Jack) Chapter 12

All that his son had inherited from him was his love of purpose and his strength of resolve. (Jack, about Levi) Chapter 12

He never realised that this distance grew not because they were different, but because they were so alike – flames or not. (Jack, about Levi) Chapter 12

His feelings for her were of the purest, awe-blinded kind of devotion. (Jack, about Charlotte) Chapter 12

In the end he could barely summon the energy to finish her cremation. He only managed it because he knew that it was what she wanted. (Fire) Chapter 12

… I’ve always found his smile unforgettable; when I think of him it’s always the first thing I see. (Charlotte about her father) Chapter 13

Thurston Hough

Thurston Hough is the rude recluse and somewhat delusional author of the coffin-making book, The Wood Jacket, with whom Levi shares a letter correspondence. He agrees to build the coffin Levi wants for his sister as he is in dire need of finances to settle his many tax debts. When the wombat farm is unable to supply the pelt he needs for the inlay, Thurston traps and kills the water rat, which had been embodying the Esk God (on its journey to meet the Cloud God), setting in motion an attack on his home by river creatures. His only comfort as he is besieged by them until death is the water rat pelt and the warmth it provides him. Unlike other deaths in the book, Thurston is not mourned by any of the Avoca citizens towards whom he was noted to be a ‘terrible neighbour’, ‘unpleasant person’ and ‘poor citizen’.

Thurston Hough Quotes

… I assume you are aware, is actually a terrorist group … (Thurston to Levi about the Country Women’s Association) Chapter 5

I use high-grade wombat pelts sourced from a premium supplier in the far south, ensuring all my coffins are more luxurious than a royal featherbed. (Mr Hough) Chapter 5

I am besieged in my own home by the creatures of the river. (Mr Hough) Chapter 5

They have started digging at the foundations of my house like dogs at a beach. (Mr Hough about water rats) Chapter 5

At night I lay it over my pillowcase, where it heats my cheek throughout all my fitful dreams. (Mr Hough, the water rat pelt) Chapter 5

… he was a terrible neighbour, an unpleasant person, and a poor citizen. (Mavis about Thurston) Chapter 8

But enough of Thurston Hough! He is as unpleasant in death as he was in life. (Mavis) Chapter 8

Senior Detective Graham Malik

The lead detective in Charlotte’s disappearance, Malik is the ex-husband of the private detective whom Levi hires. Malik shares an easy relationship with the detective, and provides her with tips in solving cases, despite a reputation for being slow to solve his own. Malik astutely notices the bewitching effect Jack has on the townspeople in diverting conversation away from himself.

Senior Detective Malik Quotes

‘… They just say he looks ordinary, acts normal, and that they can’t imagine why a policeman would be interested in him. Then their eyes glaze over and they start talking about the footy or the weather’. (Malik to the detective about Jack) Chapter 6

Graham’s instincts were rarely wrong, and I believed his anxieties even more than I believed his tips. (the detective about Malik) Chapter 6

Allen Gibson

Allen is the hardworking manager at the Melaleuca wombat farm. He experiences distressing dreams that increase with the wombat deaths and accompanying cormorant feathers. Allen knows the wombats will be harvested for their pelts, making it antithetical of him to consider them as family. Faced with losing his position and the only home he knows by failing on the supply of pelts, he sets out on killing the nearby cormorant whom he considers to be responsible. Allen becomes increasingly more delusional as a result of his dream-visions about cormorants. He is badly burned in the fire Charlotte starts and takes sanctuary in the old tin mine, where he is cared for and starts to transition into the form of a cormorant until the monstrous storm leaves his fate unclear.

Allen Gibson Quotes

I cannot bear the thought of being taken away from the farm, or from Melaleuca. If the wombats are my family, then this place is my home. (Allen) Chapter 7

We had agreed to supply over five hundred premium-grade pelts to various clients, but at this rate we will be lucky to harvest even half that number. (Allen) Chapter 7

I would visit the leader of the cormorants, and then I would now how next to proceed. … He would show me the path. (Allen) Chapter 7

Nicola

Karl’s daughter and Melaleuca farmhand Nicola loves animals and wants to study veterinarian science. She develops a friendship with Charlotte which becomes romantic as the pair journey through shared experiences. Her compassionate nature is demonstrated in how she cares for the wombats, her selflessness in stopping Charlotte’s flames in which she suffers burns herself, and her insight to her father’s grief over his seal, though it is carefully hidden underneath his loving smile for her. After Levi breaks down emotionally, it she who suggests Karl takes Levi out to meet a seal.

Nicola Quotes

Hard-working, capable and diligent, she also displays a level and affection for the livestock that I have never seen in my twenty-odd years of farming. (Allen about Nicola) Chapter 7

Nothing could match the blaze of love in her father’s smile. (Nicola) Chapter 10

A friendship defined by shared danger, but a friendship nonetheless. (Nicola about Charlotte) Chapter 10

Mavis Midcurrent

A town stalwart, hairdresser and Country Women’s Association member, Mavis’ chapter on Cake pays homage to notable Avoca town residents and reveals the hateful relationship Thurston Hough had with the town. Furthering the plot, she reveals that Thurston is dead and that it was Levi who found Thurston’s body, alerting the reader to who is now in possession of the pelt. Mavis’ story serves to underscore that hateful people will continue to be thought of as unpleasant, even after they die.

Mavis Midcurrent Quote

But enough of Thurston Hough! He is as unpleasant in death as he was in life. (Mavis) Chapter 8

The Ranger

The unnamed Southwest National Park ranger developed his love for nature by being locked outside of the house by his mother until dinner. He is somewhat of a friend to Allen Gibson and is saddened by his deteriorated mental state when called to the farm by the farmhands. After reporting the bush fire started by Charlotte to the police, he retreats into the place of comfort he’s known since childhood, taking wonder from nature, while he eagerly awaits the forest’s rebirth after the fire.

The Ranger Quotes

After school his mother would welcome him by locking him outside, where their cottage bordered a great forest of eucalyptus and sassafras. (the ranger) Chapter 9

… to let the wonder take his soul places it hadn’t been since he was a child in the forest, crouching in a branch-built shelter, thirsty for the taste of all the wild things in the world. (the ranger) Chapter 9