42 pages • 1 hour read
Exiles
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Themes
Home and Exile
As the title of the novel suggests, a central theme is home and exile. Rita says to Falk, “I don’t need to tell you, Aaron, what it’s like to suddenly feel exiled from your own community by people you trusted [...] But I can imagine it’s hard” (245). Events in the previous Aaron Falk novels, including Falk being in a fire, resulted in him avoiding Kiewarra. By the end of Exiles, Falk decides that he is interested in visiting Kiewarra again. Falk’s home being similar to Marralee aids him in solving the mystery of Kim’s disappearance. He realizes that “this is a small-town festival. Strangers wave at strangers from rides” (316). This realization leads him to see Kim was never at the festival. Raco aids Falk in coming to this conclusion, saying: “It’s like she was gone before she was gone” (283). Falk and the others at the festival saw what they expected to see of their home rather than the plain facts in front of them.
Kim’s exile involved her choice to break up with Charlie and marry Rohan. The Marralee community generally sided with Charlie, and Kim moved to Adelaide. The separation between Kim and the residents of Marralee was social and geographical. Kim’s “dwindling friendship circle” seemed to be the result of her choices (129), but it was also a result of Rohan’s abuse. He monitored her communication with people from Marralee, which caused her to not answer when people called or messaged.
At the end of the novel, Falk exiles himself from Melbourne and his job with the police by deciding to live in Marralee with Gemma. Gemma’s “white weatherboard cottage on a leafy block of land” (214) felt like home to Falk from the first time he visited. It is also welcoming to Joel. Gemma insists that it is “his home, too” (242). Joel visits after he goes away to school, and Falk moves in shortly after he comes back to Marralee. Gemma, as well as Shane and Dean, left home but returned. Gemma chooses Marralee over California and Sydney. By the end of the novel, Falk jokes with Charlie about leaving his job at the vineyard to take Dwyer’s position: “Who, leave? Me?” (353). This indicates how his priorities have shifted. He is determined to make Marralee his permanent home and spend time with the community—especially his godson—rather than focus on police work. Exile from home, in the novel, is both potentially an act of entrapment away from home or a new beginning in a new home.
Perception and Reality
Another important theme in Exiles is how perception doesn’t always match reality. Many misperceptions surround Kim, culminating in the revelation that she was never at the festival. Falk remembers seeing a “dark-haired woman and baby at the very top of the wheel” (19) wave to Rohan. He assumed the woman was Kim, as Rohan said it was. After Kim disappears, Falk fears he missed something because his “focus had not been on [Kim] at all. It was instead on Gemma” (111). Kim’s family appeals to the festival crowd a year later, asking if anyone saw her. The sightings prove to be false, however, because she wasn’t there.
Zara emphasizes that someone would have seen Kim at the reservoir. She takes Falk to the clearing above the reservoir where teenagers have their party. She says, “You can see” the reservoir (133). Falk doubts anyone at the party was sober enough to notice Kim or remember seeing her. Yet Zara says she saw Naomi leaving the festival that night. The false sightings of Kim lead the investigation in the wrong direction. For a while, Raco is frustrated, and “Falk felt the same low frustration, like there was an odd and unexpected blind spot in his peripheral vision” (248). The simile concerning vision indicates how the witnesses, who didn’t actually see Kim, mislead the investigation through memories of vision.
Falk’s perception has to change to solve the mystery. When he realizes no one spoke to Kim and that strangers wave at one another from festival rides, he considers that perhaps Kim was not at the festival: “This, here. This is what we were missing” (315). People “witnessed” something that never happened. Falk also has a breakthrough in the mystery of Dean’s death when he realizes the paint sample from the accident is “the same dull industrial blue” as the walls of the police station (254). Unprejudiced visual observation in the present is again the key to solving the mystery. Just as people thought they saw Kim because they expected to see her, they also thought the paint at the crash site was from a car because they expected it to be.
Memory’s Impact on the Present
Falk frequently compares his memories of Marralee the year Kim disappeared to his experiences when he returns a year later. For instance, he thinks the reservoir is “bigger than he’d remembered” (58). He also thinks back on meeting Gemma before Kim disappeared in Melbourne. Falk initially thinks he saw the blue paint from Dean’s accident on another car: “Had he seen this car before?” (268). These memories intrude on the present-day narrative of the days around Henry’s christening.
Marralee residents frequently discuss their memories of Kim. Rita feels guilty about not helping her at the festival, but Falk recalls Rita being busy with her own children. He thinks: “It was clear from her guilt that they recalled the incident differently” (122). However, they both recall the incident incorrectly because neither of them saw Kim at the festival in the first place. Naomi says, “We all have our own guilt about this” (125), then shares her guilt about an event that happened when they were teenagers. She admits she found Kim drunk and disheveled and that Kim asked her not to tell anyone. Raco “cataloged the party photos” (120) in an attempt to construct that night. In each case, the characters interpret current happenings through the lens of their memories.
When the point of view switches to Kim near the end, the reader learns about her memories of the assault at the party. She remembers a voice saying relax. She avoids the reservoir in an attempt to not trigger more memories from that night:
[She] feared new memories would resurface without warning. The sensation was strongest when she was down at the reservoir […] It became almost unbearable, and yet it didn’t help her remember anything. Whatever was hidden in the blackness stayed there (297-98).
Kim represses her memory so deeply that she marries the man who assaulted her. Rohan’s marital abuse sparks a realization that he assaulted her when they were teens. As others see the present through the lens of memory, Kim sees it through an absence of memory. Too many memories and too few have the same effect: the characters cannot see the truth staring them in the face. Kim’s recovery of a few pertinent memories allows the reader to see the truth behind the mystery of her disappearance.
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