at the edge of the solid world by daniel davis wood

The lyrics of these songs, with titles such as “The Unquiet Grave”, warn of the “thin places”, where the fabric between worlds wears away, allowing the fey folk to steal babies and plunge men and women “into a realm not for mortals, a realm from which there is no clear escape”.įor the narrator, who sometimes glimpses ghost children, this is grief: an intensely physical encounter with a universe gone somehow awry. Grief, says the narrator, makes you “despise the body you’re in because it dishonours your despair and forces you to survive”.Īs his relationship with his wife disintegrates, he broods on the so-called Child Ballads, a collection of European folk songs compiled by Francis Child in the 19th century. The couple stumble through the necessary arrangements to take their daughter’s ashes back to Sydney, with the quotidian requirements of travel almost unbearable for both of them. The father of one of the Sydney victims had survived the Bosnian War and yet can publicly forgive his child’s murderer his story, too, obsesses the narrator.

In his anguish, the narrator fixates on an unconnected tragedy in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where a former refugee who has lost custody of his daughter has killed multiple children in a daycare centre. In the Swiss Alps, a teacher and his Australian-born wife spiral into all-consuming grief after their baby dies. But it’s a significant literary achievement, nonetheless. At the Edge of the Solid World begins with the death of a child and then gets much, much darker.

At the edge of the solid world by daniel davis wood