Flames Summary

Two days after Levi and Charlotte spread her ashes in Notley Fern Gorge in northern Tasmania, Levi and Charlotte’s mother, Edith, returns from the dead, sprouting ferns and moss from her body. Her second life lasts four days: she spends the first two on the family’s farmland before walking to Levi and Charlotte’s father’s house and finally bursting into flames in his front yard. This kind of reincarnation happens to some women in the family after cremation. In the following weeks, Charlotte’s episodes of emotional distress disturb Levi. He resolves to build her a coffin to reassure her that she can avoid the trauma of reincarnation by being buried whole.

Meanwhile, Karl walks up the beach toward his house after a day of angling. He misses the kind of fishing he used to do on the open ocean, hunting enormous Oneblood tuna with his seal companion. He and his seal hunted together for decades—during which time Karl met his wife and had two daughters with her—before his seal was killed by a pod of orcas. As Karl walks home, he sees Levi gathering driftwood, and he later discovers Levi is building a coffin for Charlotte.

When Charlotte discovers Levi’s plans for a coffin, she packs a few necessities and runs away. She hitchhikes to a nearby town where she sleeps by the river under an upturned boat. When she wakes, she finds a water rat has curled up against her stomach for warmth. She boards a bus heading south. The bus malfunctions, so Charlotte and the rest of the passengers stay in Tunbridge overnight. At a Tunbridge bar, Charlotte hears two miners discussing a southern mining town, Melaleuca. When the miners attempt to overpower her in order to have sex, she fights them off, leaving one of them with burn marks. The next day, Charlotte gets back on the bus and heads south to Franklin, a small town where she finds a sailor who agrees to take her to Melaleuca.

The water rat Charlotte found sleeping beside her was in fact the Esk God, a deity presiding over Tasmania’s Esk Rivers. After Charlotte leaves him, he slips into the river and swims upstream to visit his lover, the Cloud God. As he swims, he observes that the clutter and pollution of humans is overwhelming the natural environment. The Esk God climbs out of the river to rest and eat, but a human traps and kills him.

Meanwhile, Levi begins to correspond with Thurston Hough, the author of a book about coffins that Levi has been reading, to ask him for help building Charlotte’s coffin. Though Thurston insults Levi and demands that Levi leave him alone in his replies, his precarious financial position pushes him to help Levi, who promises him a large sum of money.

As the correspondence continues, Thurston reports that he trapped and killed a water rat—the Esk God, though he doesn’t know that the rat was a god. Its pelt is a source of great comfort to Thurston now that the river creatures have started to attack him. Thurston later tells Levi that, thanks to the violent animals, he won’t be able to finish Charlotte’s coffin.

Levi hires a detective to find Charlotte after the police give up their search. The lead investigator on Charlotte’s case, Graham Malik, is someone the detective knows well; he tells the detective that it seems like Charlotte can fend for herself and probably chose to disappear. The detective learns from the Tunbridge miners that Charlotte was going to Melaleuca, so she asks a pilot in the capital to fly her there. As they land in Melaleuca, they see a huge stretch of land burning. A strange man walks toward the detective and tells her to leave his daughter alone; the detective realizes he’s Charlotte’s father.

Excerpts from the diary of Allen Gibson, the manager of a wombat farm in Melaleuca where Charlotte has recently begun working as a farmhand, recount the violent, mysterious deaths of several wombats over the course of a few weeks. Allen has vivid dreams about feathers and cormorants and decides that a cormorant must be responsible for the killings. He starts to resent Melaleuca, the wombats, and the farmhands, all of whom he once respected. Finally, he wakes up from one of these vivid dreams while in the process of stabbing a wombat and realizes that he’s been possessed by a cormorant spirit and has been killing the wombats all along. When Charlotte tries to stop him, he threatens her with a knife. Flames flow from Charlotte’s body, lighting a huge fire that chases Allen into an abandoned mine shaft where he begins to transform into a birdlike creature.

When Allen’s behavior begins to worry them, Charlotte and Nicola, the other farmhand, ask the ranger to arrange transport out of Melaleuca. When the ranger visits the farm, the dead wombats and Allen’s threatening behavior confirm the farmhands’ worries, and he arranges a plane to take them away. The plane lands in high winds, which prevent it from leaving until the next day. That night, the ranger wakes up to discover a huge fire raging over the fields near the farm. He helps Nicola and Charlotte board the plane and flies with them to the capital. Before he can report the incident to the police, Nicola and Charlotte escape.

Nicola and Charlotte drive north together. Over the past few weeks, the two of them have become close friends; eventually, a romance develops between them. Nicola decides to take Charlotte to the stone cabin at Cradle Mountain that belongs to a friend of Nicola’s father. There, surrounded by the safety of stone, lakes, and wet vegetation, Charlotte attempts to control the flames that have begun to leak out of her body. Nicola’s touch is the only thing that can put the flames out, a discovery that leads to Nicola and Charlotte having sex for the first time. But when Charlotte’s flames burn Nicola, Charlotte decides she needs to end their relationship in order to keep Nicola safe. Before she can do so, the detective finds them at the cabin and urges them to return north with her.

Levi, having collected the half-finished coffin along with the water rat’s pelt from Thurston’s house, returns home to find his father in the kitchen. Unbeknownst to everyone except the late Edith, Levi and Charlotte’s father is an ancient fire spirit who has the ability to move into and out of any fire on the island and to “spark” ideas in human minds. He left the family several years ago when Edith found out he had used his ability to convince her to love him; since then, his relationships with his children have only deteriorated. When Levi’s father expresses that he’s worried about him, Levi—emboldened by the confidence he feels when he holds the pelt—refuses to listen and instead drives away to Notley Fern Gorge, where he starts making a new coffin for Charlotte out of tree ferns.

Charlotte and Nicola follow the detective back to Charlotte and Levi’s home. It’s empty. Charlotte suspects that Levi has gone to the gorge. When they find him there, he’s emaciated and seems not to remember ever hiring the detective. Charlotte tries to convince him to stop building the coffin. When he insists that the coffin will be good for Charlotte, she’s unable to stop flames from erupting from her body and setting the valley on fire. Nicola desperately smothers Charlotte to put the fire out, but by this point the flames have spread, and it seems there’s no way to escape. Charlotte sees her father emerging from the flames. He mouths something to her before disappearing in the first drops of a huge downpour, a manifestation of the Cloud God’s grief for the Esk God.

Levi wakes up the next day. Charlotte tells him the detective has gone home, Nicola is in hospital for her burns, and the biggest flood in centuries extinguished the fire. Levi and Charlotte apologize to each other. They visit Nicola at the hospital, where Levi tries to apologize to her and her family but instead starts sobbing. Nicola suggests Levi go out to sea with her father, Karl; Levi agrees. Following Karl’s instructions, Levi plunges into the water and swims away from the boat. Just as he feels completely exhausted from staying afloat, a seal pup swims up to him. Levi and the seal form a long-lasting bond.