Flames: Coal Summary & Analysis

Many centuries earlier, when a woman strikes two rocks together to make a spark, a kind of fire spirit is born. He falls in the form of a spark onto a pile of dried leaves, where he grows into a flame. He surveys his surroundings; he sees both dead fuel and vibrant life, like the woman who is feeding him sticks and making him grow. He realizes that he exists for more reasons than to eat and grow—he can cook the woman’s food and make ash for her to mix into paint. Then the woman splashes him out with water, and he learns the feelings of fear and horror for the first time.

Later, the fire spirit comes back to life when lightning hits a dead tree. Now he’s somewhere different, a forest at the edge of the sea. He moves through the trees, growing into a “swollen beast” and feeling like no amount of water could stop him, but then a huge downpour puts him out. This time, he knows he will return. He wakes again in the clearing of a bush. The humans have surrounded him with rocks to stop him from growing, which teaches him frustration, then patience. The humans use his flames to keep warm, and he learns that he has the power not only to end life but to nurture it.

The fire spirit keeps coming to life in new places. Eventually, he realizes he can bring himself to life in any fire on the island simply by concentrating. He can travel through fire between highlands, beaches, and bogs in seconds, and his life spans lengthen from hours to months. On his travels, he meets beings like him that inhabit other elements and creatures. He finds he’s most invested in people—after all, it’s people who brought him to life and who he’s spent so much time helping. He discovers he can take the form of a human when he attempts to mimic a man skinning a wallaby: suddenly, he has hands of his own and eventually a body that he forms in the image of the wallaby skinner.

Once the fire spirit has finessed his human form, he looks around him at the wallaby skinner sleeping amongst other humans. He slinks away and returns in the morning, introducing himself to them as a lost traveler. The people accept him, and when he introduces himself to different groups of people over the next few decades, they accept him, too. Because the fire spirit doesn’t age, he needs to keep moving from group to group. He finds that although he enjoys human company, he can’t fully relate to their pain and joy, and it’s easier for him to watch from afar.

When the “paler people” arrive on the island, they cause the indigenous people pain, to which the fire spirit responds by destroying the settlers’ buildings, docks, and ships. Eventually, though, he’s tempted by their new, intricate tools and plans, and he enjoys exploding gunpowder, burning gas to make light, and melting candles in houses. Even more than this, he loves being kindled into fires hotter than he’s ever known for the purpose of melting ore. He begins to make excuses for not helping the indigenous people. But he knows he’s being selfish; he really just wants to keep learning from the settlers.

As more and more settlers arrive, the fire spirit begins to walk amongst them as a human in order to gain more of their knowledge. They don’t react well to his brown-skinned appearance, but he doesn’t want to betray his love for the people who brought him to life, so instead of changing his skin, he attempts to light “tiny sparks” in the settlers’ minds to persuade them to accept him. Sometimes, when this doesn’t work, he lights other sparks in their minds, which prevent them from perceiving him objectively. Once he’s learned enough from them, he lights a final spark that burns out their memory of him.

The fire spirit is happy with his ever-changing existence until he meets a woman in Notley Fern Gorge. There, he’s a small fire on a twig. He sits near her, enthralled by her appearance, until she douses him with her water bottle. He goes looking for her and finds her by the ocean. He learns she’s called Edith McAllister; her family has lived on a farm on the north coast for five generations. Edith’s family history of brief reincarnations doesn’t interest the fire spirit much—he’s seen a lot in his many lifetimes—but he does consider it something that connects him to Edith.

The fire spirit follows Edith, watching her tend to the animals on the farm and pondering how to make her love him back. The first time he appears to her as a human, she chases him off the property. The next time, he changes his face and orders for her at the fish and chip shop, but she’s offended by his attempt at gallantry. The third time, he finds her in a pub. His appearance is the same as the first time he took human form. He offers to buy Edith a drink. She refuses his offer, which leads him to make what he’ll later consider “the worst mistake of his life”: he lights a spark in her mind that removes the negative feelings she has for him.

The fire spirit’s spark doesn’t convince Edith to take him seriously, so he lights another, and then three more—he gives her, in the end, five chances. After the fifth spark, she begins to talk to him. He invites her to go on a bush walk with him in the gorge, pretending he’s never been there before. On the walk, he talks about things he knows she’s interested in; by the end of their walk, she’s willing to consider a second date. They spend a lot of time together over the next few months, and he moves into the farmhouse with her. One day, she takes him into the gorge and asks him to marry her; he says yes.

The fire spirit (who now thinks of himself as Jack, his human name) and Edith have a child—a boy, Levi, who looks just like Edith and bears no resemblance to Jack. Though Jack loves Levi deeply, he relates to him less and less as he grows up. When their daughter, Charlotte, is born, Jack feels an instant connection to her. The night he and Edith bring her home from the hospital, Jack leans over her cot. A tear falls from his eye, but it takes the form of a flame. The flame drops into Charlotte’s mouth, but she doesn’t seem hurt. Jack picks her up and shakes her, and when she burps, a blue flame bursts from her mouth.

Edith witnesses Jack and Charlotte leaking fire. Though she’s wary of Jack’s ability at first, after he explains who he is, she becomes even closer to him. He shows her the different things he can do with fire, and she feels lucky to have married someone so unique. The children grow up: Levi remains dutiful and serious, and there are no more signs of the fire within Charlotte. But at a parent-teacher meeting, when Charlotte’s teacher begins to rant about Charlotte’s bad behavior, Jack clicks his fingers to light a spark in her brain. The teacher pauses, then she begins to rave about Charlotte’s kindness and work ethic.

Edith asks Jack to explain what he did to the teacher. He describes his ability to change people’s minds. She asks him if he’s ever done it to her. He pauses, and from that pause, Edith knows that he has. She doesn’t want to know the details of how he influenced her; she simply asks him to leave. Despite Jack’s pleas, she tells him never to come back to the house again. For years, he leaps out of fires near her, begging her to take him back. He lights a spark in a rich man’s mind to convince him to bequeath him a huge house close to Edith’s farm, which he moves into when the man dies as proof that he intends to stay close by. Still, he doesn’t intrude on Edith’s privacy. When she gets sick, he doesn’t know until he sparks to life around her funeral pyre. 

As Jack burns around Edith’s dead body, he suffers “his biggest death of all.” He only keeps burning because he knows it’s Edith’s wish to be cremated. When she returns and stands on his lawn, he can’t tell whether the look in her eyes anger, sadness, regret, or forgiveness is. When she burns out for the second time, he feels like his most human parts die with her. He returns to his previous life of flitting between fires, but this time he feels purposeless, reduced to the very first form he took when the woman brought him to life. When Charlotte starts leaking flames, he watches from afar, and when Levi becomes sick with grief, he doesn’t try very hard to help him: he doesn’t want to be close to his children when, like Edith, they eventually die.