In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay unfolds a strange, ambiguous story of a group of school girls who, along with the teachers and staff at their school, take a journey into the Australian Outback in February of 1900. The trip is for a routine picnic, but at the end of the day, one teacher and three students have vanished, seemingly into thin air. The book becomes about the fall-out of this strange event, about the ripples sent out through the lives of those who knew the disappeared.
Author Joan Lindsay wrote this brief novel (which clocks in at just under 200 pages) over the space of only two weeks. During that time, she would later say, the story was given to her in more or less chronological order in a series of unsettling dreams. Whether this is true or not is, like a lot of things in this novel, up to you to decide, but it certainly feels true. The book has a strange, dreamy quality even before the disappearances. There’s a sense of haziness and fogginess to the prose that creates a sense of uncertainty and unreality. And this definitely isn’t the book for you if you’re a reader that likes every puzzle to have a solution and every story to have a definitive ending.
Ultimately, it’s this uncertainty and ambiguity that the book is about. For such a short book, the novel has a large cast of characters that are all well sketched and what Lindsay is interested in is the way living with the inexplicable impacts these different characters. Faced with an insoluble problem and a situation in which they are all helpless either to perform any action or even to understand the situation as it is, these characters respond in a myriad of ways. Some, especially those of the “servant class,” react to these events with equanimity that at first seems surprising until you remember that they’ve essentially spent their entire lives in situations beyond their control. Some of the slightly shallow upper class initially see the event as a great adventure, a curiosity to break up the boredom of their usually dull lives. Still others find their entire worldview and sense of self crumbling when faced with a situation that they can’t resolve with either their rational minds or the sheer strength of their will. The most compelling and chilling of this latter category is the school’s headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard, and her descent into a kind of madness is harrowing and disturbing.
The book has that strange atmosphere that I mentioned above and there’s a sense of immensity to the setting. You never forget that these are so-called “civilized” human beings carving a life for themselves out of one of the most hostile environments in the world, but the characters themselves often seem to have forgotten. I think another major theme of the book relates to the way these characters view their environment as somehow subservient to them; there’s no respect for the natural world, no sense that they understand that, to the natural world, they are of no consequence and have no power. That feeling of the overwhelming natural world looming over these characters and this school is really palpable. Late in the novel, two characters leave the school in an attempt to move on with their lives and put things behind them, but the novel follows them briefly on their journey away and they are then killed in a tragic hotel fire. In some books, this might feel like an unnecessary detail or a forced resolution; but here it just serves to underline the helplessness of these people in the hands of a universe that doesn’t operate by their rules. They may believe they have left the wilderness behind them, but they remain just as subject to the random and accidental whims of an uncaring universe. And it is, I think, ultimately this realization that drives the existential horror of the book and, for my money, it lands like a ton of bricks.
Interestingly enough, Lindsay actually wrote a chapter giving a thorough explanation for the mysterious events at Hanging Rock. Her editor convinced her to remove it and, you know, chalk one up for the editors this time around. The book certainly wouldn’t have the lingering impact it does now if it had that final chapter. As it stands, it’s a gripping, incredibly well-characterized meditation on our all too feeble attempts to exert control over our environments and the ways we fall apart when those attempts go awry. 4 stars.
tl;dr – dreamy, often unsettling novella delves deeply into the psychology of its characters as they wrestle with an inexplicable tragedy; gripping meditation on our place in a frightening world. 4 stars.
