The Stars are a Million Glittering Worlds
by Gina Butson

Gina Butson’s debut novel, The Stars Are A Million Glittering Worlds, is – much like the cover – a kaleidoscope of colour and place. Over the course of fifteen years, from country to country, the main character, Thea, runs from her past and navigates friendship and tragedy along the way. The story traverses mountaintops, clubs flickering under strobe lights, wind-lashed coastlines, and gravesides. It is at once a travel novel, a mystery, a domestic drama, and a thoughtful meditation on guilt and grief.

Butson has a talent for bringing place to life. Each setting – Muriwai, Ruapehu, San Pedro, Melbourne, Hobart, Wellington – is sensorially rich. From the ‘bite of ice-tinged air’ in the King Country where ‘wisps of mist settle into the crook of the land,’ to San Pedro’s ‘crocodile’s back of dark green peaks’ where buses line the cobbled roads like ‘many footed dragons’ and ‘a different soundtrack blares from each’, the ‘music clanging in overlapping waves’. This colour, movement, and life is virtual tourism for the reader, and provides ground upon which the novel’s thematic weight can land.

The story begins with tragedy – an unnamed catastrophe for which Thea feels responsible. What happened, exactly, is withheld from the reader for much of the novel, creating a central mystery that drives the story. Thea’s secret chases her from place to place. She drifts ‘like a piece of shipwreck on ocean currents’, never settling or finding home. We are swept along with her through foreign lands as the effects of her guilt play out in complicated relationships. We feel her inability to find peace, as the pressure builds from things unsaid for so long.

The perpetual travel feels intentionally unsettling. In San Pedro in particular, there is a sense of imminent danger brought about by the characters’ ‘carelessness for personal safety’. Everyone is running from something, putting seas and islands between themselves and their pasts – breakups, alcoholic families, or their own privilege. This recklessness results in a new tragedy, the details of which also remain hidden. And so we have two mysteries, new guilt, and multiple secrets that loom like the shadow of Tajumulco, ‘marking time’. The effect is a ‘slow glacial slide’ over the course of the novel. The reader is pulled along towards the reveal, and when the moment of catastrophe comes, it hits hard. I felt a little shaky reading it.

The time Butson spends developing her characters’ psychological complexities gives the ending much of its impact. Unresolved guilt, and the blurry division between fault and blamelessness, is explored from numerous angles. One is a conversation about a ‘permatourism’ that creates the ‘rainbow swirls’ of San Pedro on the surface, and the ‘dark oiliness’ underneath; or dancing ‘under criss-crossing laser lights in Xibalba’ and ‘running fingers through the golden air’ to ‘beer bottles, full ashtrays and other detritus of backpacker life’ washed up against walls by morning. ‘All these coke addicts, just spending their days partying in someone else’s country’ because it is anywhere but home suggests the consequences of drug culture for the tourist wonderland itself.

It is this culture that leads to the second disaster midway through the novel and bonds Thea to Chris, a fellow backpacker. The two form a collusive relationship, each drawn to the secrecy of the other. Time, Thea reflects, ‘is slow and wide, and deep enough to hold memories and secrets out of sight for years,’ but even then, ‘hidden things still exist’. Mutual guilt creates toxic reciprocity in Chris and Thea’s relationship, as well as fertile ground for manipulation. With so much unspoken between them, Thea can only wonder what other secrets Chris is keeping. How can they trust each other? ‘They have helped each other carry secrets over all these years. And their secrets have been slowly crushing them.’

When secrets are exposed, Chris and Thea – a reflection of each other for so long – respond in opposite ways. Thea has the option, due to new information, to see herself as (perhaps justifiably) blameless, but still questions whether or not she should accept responsibility anyway. Without spoiling the nature of the catastrophe, I will say only that her conclusions are surprising, and that here the story explores subtly profound and existential territory.

There is a quiet meditation throughout the novel on the tension between fate and free will. The cosmic is a character in the story, represented through forces larger and older than humans – mountains, glaciers, oceans, stars or, as in Maya cosmology, what is always there:

woven through the small bays and high into the ancient hills: the red thread of the east wind, the black of the west wind, the white north wind, and the yellow wind from the south, blowing across the mountain tops and rippling the surface of the lake since the time before conquistadors, saints and tourists.

The human connection to the cosmic is inevitable. Just as ‘the sand began life as volcanic rock’, through death, ‘all that was bone and ligament, tendon and muscle, is now rock and snow’. We are a part, the novel suggests, of forces greater than ourselves – forces that move, act, and cause significant conflict in the lives of the characters. ‘No one can control a mountain’, after all, and characters are also ‘at the mercy of the people’ they’re with, implicated in their lives and tragedies.

This link between the personal and the universal brings the dead to life. They are present in the stars, like the piece of Thea that once died and ‘returned to stardust before it ever shone’. They are present in the dirt, where Thea directs her words, hoping they will ‘sink down through the earth and somehow reach’ the dead. They almost appear from time to time, like when Thea ‘feels the air dip’ as though her dead friend ‘just perched herself on the arm rest beside her’. Even while Thea’s questions drift ‘unanswered out into dark space’, the sun is ‘a reminder that there are other places, far from here’, and that ‘the stars are a million glittering worlds’.

There is a confidence to Butson’s debut, a strength evident in her lyrical balance of interiority and action, and in her command of the narrative. It compels the reader, drifts us along with the characters then tumbles us to shore to thaw in the sun, spent. This book is both an intriguing narrative and an om. A slow exhale. A meditation on letting go of the past through an awareness of our place in the world and the role we play in it.