Rachel Morton’s debut is a languid, easy novel that explores the unease that emerges when a busy life is forced into slowness. The Sun Was Electric Light, which won the 2024 Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript, follows Ruth, a woman who feels increasingly disconnected from her life in New York, so she moves to a small lake town in Guatemala. It is the last place she remembers where things felt real.
In Panajachel, Ruth lives a life of simplicity, allowing instinct to guide her through the days. She feels no particular urgency or anxiety – and yet, she isn’t exactly at peace either. The solution she had come to Guatemala in search of continues to elude her: “I realised that the lake would not solve my problems and that nothing would solve my problems. I gave up trying and giving up felt liberating, for about fifteen minutes at a time.”
During a period of giving up trying, Ruth meets two women. The first, Emilie, is also a foreigner, whom Ruth admires for her calm practicality. Ruth and Emilie quickly fall into a romantic relationship, although an emotional distance between them prevents their connection from reading as overly meaningful. Shortly after, Ruth also meets Carmen, whom she has “wanted to know” since she first spotted her in the street. Carmen is the antithesis of Emilie; to Ruth, they represent “two ways of being in the world. There was Carmen’s way and there was Emilie’s. Both ways were inside me, and I had to choose.”
Ruth is drawn to Carmen because she is strange and striking; Carmen was born in Panajachel to American parents, which gives her an odd quality of being simultaneously a local and an outsider. Ruth and Carmen strike up an intense friendship, though the two never become lovers. But beneath Carmen’s easy charm is a sense of instability; both of her parents “went crazy at the same time”, and there’s a hint that she might suffer similarly, disappearing occasionally for days at a time. Although she frames these as brief escapes to blow off steam, those close to Carmen are concerned.
Questions of sanity, meaning and control are clearly of significance in The Sun Was Electric Light, a book about figuring out how to belong as much as it is about how to be good. Interestingly, we don’t get a strong sense of who does “belong” in Panajachel – the locals are mostly background, a tactic that allows Morton to avoid exoticising the people and the place, as well as reinforcing Ruth’s sense of disconnection. Being a foreigner in an isolated town gives her space to reflect, but this also keeps her at arm’s length from the community. She is always reminded – even by her friends – that she doesn’t really belong and, in some ways, this seems to suit her.
Through a different lens, Ruth might also be seen as “crazy”: she’s packed in her life because it started to feel fake and left everything to chase a distant memory of happiness. She is unwilling to put down roots, and although she comes across as deeply caring of others, she also makes decisions on a whim and seems able to leave people behind with little thought. None of this is a criticism of the novel, or even of Ruth herself. In fact, it’s Morton’s sure writing that allows this edge of hypocrisy to come through without making Ruth any less sympathetic or fully-formed.
The simple clarity of Morton’s prose conceals the clever complexity of how she approaches her themes of care and connection. Some obvious questions come with a story like this – about the privilege and power of whiteness, the ethics of starting over on someone else’s land, and having the financial means to consider doing so in the first place – and Morton manages to acknowledge these without attempting to answer them fully. Ruth is imperfect in many ways, but she never imposes her own answers on those around her, leaning instead towards a quiet acceptance of her life’s trajectory. Morton’s true restraint is here, rejecting emotional epiphany in favour of something that feels more real and more gently profound.
The Sun Was Electric Light by Rachel Morton is published by UQP ($34.99)
