FICTION
Girl Falling
Hayley Scrivenor
Macmillan, $34.99

The epigram to Hayley Scrivenor’s new crime novel says it all: “To the friends that mess us up and the ones that save us.” Girl Falling is about those relationships that develop in high school that may haunt us for the rest of our lives. Indeed, I reached the last page – breathlessly it must be said – and lay awake for hours replaying the intensity of my own friendships and their aftermath, the joy and pain they delivered in equal spades. This is a book that invites you to remember and to empathise.

Ultimately, Girl Falling is a remarkable exercise in complex story-telling written in Scrivenor’s idiosyncratic, metaphorically vivid prose, and it’s a worthy sequel to the best-selling, prize-winning, international phenomenon that was Dirt Town. While the former experimented with different points of view, including a collective chorus of children, Girl Falling is written in the first person. From page one we are taken into the confidence of the central character, the seemingly naïve Finn Young, who poses the ominous question that drives the narrative: “Why would my best friend want to destroy my life?”

We first encounter Finn on a cliff edge (literally and metaphorically) in the Blue Mountains, “the rock shining yellow and blood orange in the sun”. Finn, her best friend Daphne, and her girlfriend Magdu are about to embark on a climb down the side of a cliff bizarrely known as the Kamikaze Koala. Daphne and Finn are experienced climbers; Magdu is not. One of them falls to their death “in the time it takes a door to slam shut” and we’re only on page seven.

From thereon chapters alternate between two time frames, the aftermath of the accident and what happened “before”. The before includes the moment when Finn first met Daphne in year 10 at Indra High, Indra being the fictional name of a town that is “two thirds of the way along a chain of mountain towns that snaked ever higher and deeper into the national park”.

Finn discovers the desolate Daphne weeping in the toilets following the death of her little sister who has killed herself. After Finn’s younger sister also takes her own life by jumping off a cliff, the two become inseparable even though as Finn observes, “Daphne and I had nothing in common. Until we did.”

As Finn dwells on the past, she also tells us how she and Magdu first met and how they fell instantly in love. Finn identifies as bisexual, a term she embraces because it chimes right with her, “the correct note played on a piano”, although she’s hardly been in any kind of long-term relationship with either sex. It’s a form of bravado.

Finn appears at times just a tad gormless, with an enviable propensity to go to sleep when things go badly, the kind of sleep that can “sever the connection” between herself and a distressing event. Until, that is, she has to face up to it all.