Toni Morrison once observed that “all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was”. Morrison was talking about writing, but her thinking was steeped in the fluvial, the tendency of rivers to reassert themselves in the face of human interference. As Morrison said, “ ‘floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering”.
Morrison had the Mississippi in mind, but she could easily have been talking about the creeks and rivers that flow through Kathleen Jennings’ new novel, Honeyeater. Set in the fictional suburb of Bellworth in a fantastical version of Brisbane, that oddly impermanent urban agglomeration the historian Margaret Cook famously described as “a river with a city problem”, Honeyeater transforms the city’s suburbia into a littoral space haunted by the memory of violence and loss and inhabited by ghosts
and monsters.
At the centre of the novel is Charlie Wren. The descendant of one of Bellworth’s oldest families, Charlie is an oddly unfixed person. As a boy he was attacked by an old man who lived further up the creek, an experience he survived only because of the intervention of his sister, Cora. But while he survived, Charlie was permanently altered by the attack. Supported by Cora, he has drifted through a succession of jobs and girlfriends. More worryingly, he has become a locus of mysterious disappearance, as women he knows keep vanishing.
When Charlie returns to Bellworth to clear out his Aunt Ida’s house, he encounters Grace. Grace is a different kind of locus, a tangle of memories that have taken on human form that wants to remain alive. As the two of them struggle to understand Grace’s nature it becomes clear she is somehow connected to the disappearances that encircle Charlie and the violence that lies beneath the surface
of Bellworth.
Jennings, whose first novel, 2020’s Flyaway, won a British Fantasy Award and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, imbues her narrative with a gloriously gothic sensibility. Water swirls and rises, invading the present and dislodging the buried and hidden. It’s a process that’s captured in rich and sinuous prose and in which the genuinely eerie is everywhere. While it’s difficult not to wonder about the lack of Indigenous presence – Jennings seems to want the half-remembered but still-present brutality of Bellworth’s origins to stand in for that larger violence – the result is a book of real power and beauty shot through with an unsettling sense of the landscape it inhabits.
Picador, 257pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
September 20, 2025 as “Honeyeater”.
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