Here are the first two sentences of “Hostess” by Fiona McFarlane, a story in her new collection, Highway Thirteen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024): “I met Jill in 1982. We were working the Sydney-to-LA route, and she looked exactly the way an air hostess was supposed to: like Marilyn Monroe on stilts, playing the part of a firm, friendly nurse with a naughty inner life.”
I first read these sentences in an issue of the Paris Review. I was on a plane too: the New York-to-London route. Despite the success of her two novels and her previous collection, The High Places (winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize), I’d never read Fiona McFarlane. I thought maybe this was because she’s Australian. I have never visited Australia; I have never wanted to visit Australia. According to a website that calculates such things, the furthest city on the globe from my hometown in New York is Perth. Perth—I’ve heard of Perth. That’s my relationship to Australia: I’ve heard of it. British colonial history, kangaroos, Sydney Opera House, UGG boots.
I finished “Hostess” somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean—and then, as the story’s revelatory ending requires, immediately read it again. The second time around, I felt like a local. Most of the story takes place in a tiny, isolated beach town on the north coast of Western Australia, where the male narrator rents a room from another retired flight attendant, Jill. He idolizes Jill—so do I. There is a silkiness about her, a casual, tantalizing cool. She looks “like luck.” And yet there’s something off: a strange fixation on her younger sister’s upcoming marriage. McFarlane has a gift for crafting characters with layers, like onions—do they have onions in Australia? The narrator knows there are things he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t care. “Don’t get me wrong,” he admits, “if she’d loved me, I would have considered myself lucky.” But their love is not the one that matters most to the story. It’s something else, yet another layer, which McFarlane illuminates at just the right moment—it felt like the landing of a plane.
Let it be known that I have, in fact, met quite a few Australians over the years. So have you, if you’ve ever been to a youth hostel, backpacker’s lodge, WWOOF farm, or digital-nomad hotspot. Once, at a farm-stay in Hokkaido, Japan, I replaced a young couple from Sydney—I was arriving on the same train on which they were leaving.
“You’re going to love it,” the woman said.
To which the man added: “If you like rice.”
Another time, at a hostel in Bled, Slovenia, a friend and I met a woman from Melbourne who told us that she had been “on holiday” for the last two months. For some reason, I always bristle at this syntax; it reminds me of the way Americans talk about drugs. You’re on holiday, I’m on Accutane.
“Two months is a long holiday,” I said.
“You have to go to Bali,” she said.
In Guanajuato, Mexico, my partner and I found ourselves eating lunch with a man from Sydney who was working on a memoir. We told him, hesitantly, that we had no plans to visit Australia. “Good,” he said. “Don’t.” We’re still in touch. Recently he wrote that Australia’s greatest contribution to the world is the invention of the flat white. He’s back in Sydney now, but he’s going on holiday again soon—to Bali, I believe.
Australians are everywhere. Perhaps because they live in a wealthy country with decent corporate benefits; perhaps it’s a vestige of colonial migration and trips “home” to England; perhaps it’s because they’re sea-locked and have to fly everywhere. Whatever the reason, they are some of the world’s most fervent travelers. But what does it mean, McFarlane seems to ask, to belong to a nation defined by departure?
“Abroad” follows an expatriated Australian in Texas, grappling with trauma on the night of American Halloween. “Chaperone” follows an all-girls Catholic school trip to Rome. “Tourists” takes place in a fictional town in Australia frequented by visitors of all kinds, drawn to the site of a tragedy like moths to light. In all these stories, protagonists find themselves in unfamiliar waters. I couldn’t help but pray they would eventually find land.
Take “Hostel,” first published in the New Yorker this past spring. In it, a middle-aged Australian woman remembers her friends’ encounter with a distressed girl staying at a backpacker’s hostel in their neighborhood. The friends, Roy and Mandy, are happily married; the girl’s name, in the retelling, is only S, and they find her sobbing outside the hostel. Roy and Mandy get nostalgic for their old wanderlust (“There was the time at a hostel on Mykonos when, apparently, Roy sat on a top bunk, his legs dangling while Mandy stood between them sucking him off”). They decide to take S home with them, nurse her back to health.
At this point in the story, someone in Mandy and Roy’s audience usually asked them if they’d ever worried that the girl might be dangerous…Mandy would say that she had only done what she hoped some stranger might one day do, if necessary, for her own daughter.
Here we see a product of Australia’s adventure culture: the accumulation of trust. Trust in strangers, in the law, in humanity itself. But who are the strangers here, really? Who is in danger? And what happens—to a person, to a family, to a nation—when that trust is broken?
Travel has always been an act of vulnerability. Ask anyone for their best travel story, and it will always include some aspect of uncertainty, exposure, or risk. On that trip to Bled, Slovenia—the day after we met the woman from Melbourne—my friend and I went off the typical tourist’s path to a lesser-known peak in the Julian Alps. It was gorgeous, serene; it was also remote and challenging and took much longer than we expected. On the way down, we realized we were going to miss the last bus back. We had no more food, nowhere to sleep, no cell service. We made it to a local mountain road before the sun went down, but we were still many miles from the nearest station. If we hadn’t been so tired, I think we would have been more scared.
Then an old Slovenian couple drove by in a little red car. I made some one-armed gesture—half hello, half help. We got in, they drove us out of the mountains, and we made the bus with seconds to spare. Of course we did. Of course it all worked out. Of course the squat, gray-maned Slovenians were kind and cute and completely harmless. Back at the hostel, we regaled the other backpackers with the tale of our voyage—one they could never replicate. Of course they were jealous. I felt, in that moment, a little Australian.
My friend and I still talk about that trip. At the time I think it validated something for both of us, some notion about the goodness of the world. We were around twenty years old—impressionable, newly independent, idealistic. Ripe for a cosmic message or a Nike slogan. Whatever it is, just do it. Everything will work out.
But I see now, after reading Highway Thirteen, that we were lucky. Lucky that a car came by at the right time. Lucky that in a state of helplessness, we received help. Lucky that we were two able-bodied men. Lucky that we were able to peer over the edge of danger without falling in.
McFarlane’s narrator in “Hostel” puts it best: “There are so few opportunities to get close to the largeness of life, its terror and mystery, while remaining perfectly safe.”
There is something I haven’t said about these stories that you need to know. Let’s call it the wallaby in the room. Here it is: All the stories in Highway Thirteen are about a serial killer named Paul Biga.
They’re not all about-about him.Some stories are so loosely connected to Biga and his murder victims that only after reading the entire collection do the tiny connections or references reveal themselves. Others, like “Demolition” or “Hunter on the Highway,” orbit Biga’s world quite closely.
Technically, Paul Biga is a fictional serial killer who murders and buries his victims in a fictional forest in Australia in 1998. But I’ll save you the Google search: Paul Biga is likely based on Ivan Milat, the Australian “Backpacker Murderer” of the late twentieth-century, who, like Biga, preyed on young travelers, mostly women, hitchhiking along a popular highway.
Thus, Highway Thirteen belongs to the sub-genre known as “linked stories.” In most cases, this means that the collected stories share characters, or settings, or even chronology—but McFarlane’s collection marks an innovation in story-linkage technology. At times, reading it feels like tiptoeing through a haunted house, waiting for the murderer to pop out. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t exhilarating when he does.
When it comes to linked collections, though, the whole should not be greater than the sum of its parts. The whole should be exposed only through close examination of each distinct part in its own context. If one or two of the stories in the collection fall flat, it is because they don’t have emotional stakes of their own—they use the specter of Biga and his victims as a crutch. I’ve never liked true-crime media—if you do, then maybe even stories like “Podcast” will leave an impact on you, and maybe the stories that focus on Biga will be your favorites. But for a squeamish true-crime landlubber like me, the stories I remember most are the ones that follow the dramas of the heart.
Even now, when I think about this collection, I think back to that time on my flight to London when I first read “Hostess.” I didn’t know, then, about the forthcoming linked collection. I didn’t know about the serial killer who lurked between the lines. I didn’t know about the journey ahead of me: the far-off places I would visit, the assorted minds I would inhabit, the shocking horrors I would witness. I only knew that I had found a worthy guide. And now that it’s over, I’ll say this: it was certainly worth the trip.
