Read This: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay is a classic mystery novel that is as easily weird as it is literary fiction. Set in Australia on Valentine’s Day, 1900, and the month after, the story revolves around the inexplicable disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher during an outing to Hanging Rock, a local geological formation. 

Lindsay details the lives of those left behind following the incident and its consequences in an almost breezy style, gossipy and omniscient. There is a disorienting contrast between her tone and the repercussions for those who knew the missing girls, or who were drawn into the mystery as strangers to them.  Reputations crumble from the lack of reason. Hearts break. And the chatty narrative sweeps the reader along until the end, when we are left to realize that none of the broken threads we’ve been following ever knit up again.

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Strangely enough, almost nothing explicitly otherworldly happens over the course of the story. It is the utter absence of any explanation that casts an eerie pall over the events. 

One girl comes back from Hanging Rock alone, and remembers nothing more than a reddish mist in the air. One girl is found still alive after a week, and remembers nothing at all. There is no recounting of the actual experience, and only a cursory attempt by authorities at a rational explanation for it.

The characters in Picnic at Hanging Rock are almost all observers, unable to piece together what happened, and how. No one has the language to describe it, much less explore it. The closest the novel ever comes to it is in the nightmares and prophetic dreams of the two young men who found the sole survivor. 

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Throughout Picnic at Hanging Rock Lindsay maintains the disturbing, uncanny tension between knowing everything about the schoolgirls, and nothing about what happened to them. And while the minute details of the characters and their surroundings are all described in vivid detail, Hanging Rock itself remains indistinct, a dreamscape, terra incognita. It is a strange and lovely read. I recommend it highly.