Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Turning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Memory
Family, Violence, and Love
Addiction
Belonging and Escape
Regret and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
Late at night, the narrator of “Aquifer” is watching TVabsentmindedly when his attention is caught by a news report of human bones being found in a lake. Recognizing almost immediately the place being filmed, he turns off the TV and joins his wife in bed. Unable to sleep, he thinks of various topics, including the students he will be teaching tomorrow and an unspecified war. At dawn, without waking his wife and without leaving a note, he gets in his car and begins to drive from Angelus to the suburbs of Perth he grew up in, a five-hour journey.
Certain clues, such as the mention of a forensics team, set this chapter much closer to the present day. The news’s unlikely prompting of the narrator’s memories hints that the unpredictable nature of memory works will be a central focus of this story, as will the mysterious, enormous impacts that certain memories have on one’s personality. Bound up with these memories are the narrator’s sense of place, and of home. The narrator has apparently not returned to his hometown in a long time, yet the recollections that have returned to him unexpectedly drive him to do so on a whim.
Themes
In an extended flashback lasting most of the chapter, the narrator of “Aquifer” recounts the neighborhood of his childhood, a then-newly developed suburb abutting a swamp, reclaimed from bushland (wilderness). Populated by immigrants and working-class people, the houses of the neighborhood were built with foraged materials and without any broader plan, forming a jumble of architectural styles on the edge of the city. Within the neighborhood, they lived a typical mid-century suburban life, with husbands at work, wives tending gardens, and bakers and other delivery trucks bringing them food. The diverse neighborhood even included an Aboriginal family, the Joneses.
For the narrator, remembering his childhood neighborhood does not just bring back individual memories or the atmosphere of his home. Instead, it resurrects an entire world that has disappeared, the distinctive physical and psychological environment of the midcentury Australian suburb. The story implicitly contrasts this old world with the present day, foreshadowing the changed landscape he will find there when he returns.
Themes
Constantly warned to stay away from the swamp, the narrator of “Aquifer” roams the rest of the neighborhood, developing a particular fixation with their then-new payphone, where he repeatedly dials 1194, the number to hear the exact time. He soon begins walking to school, too, with other neighborhood kids, including Bruno the Yugo, a Serbian boy, and Alan Mannering, a Pom who bullies him ceaselessly. He also spends time with the Box children, who come from a large, Catholic family and live across the street.
The freedom to aimlessly roam the neighborhood and the firm injunction not to go beyond its borders demonstrate both the way the narrator and his community lived in the past and the dreamlike, safe, and contained space of both childhood and memory through which he pictures that community. His obsession with the payphone is in fact an obsession with memory, marking the passage of time with scientific precision. The varied cast of characters with distinctive names and nicknames emphasizes both the real diversity of the neighborhood and the exaggerated, storybook-like quality it has taken on in the narrator’s memory.
Themes
The neighborhood slowly develops, with gardens grown. Another neighbor shows the narrator of “Aquifer” how the seemingly dry land sits over a large aquifer. As the kids age, they start to ignore their parents’ warnings and play in and around the swamp; on the other side of the swamp, Italian immigrants drain the water to sustain their vegetable plots, which are their main source of income. The neighborhood diversifies, slowly, with more nonwhite families moving in or nearby. As time passes, the only family the narrator and his peers avoid are the Joneses, who he describes as “angry”; the Joneses beat his brother once, inspiring lifelong animosity and, it is implied, racism toward Aboriginal people.
The slow development and diversification of the neighborhood exposes contradictions that were not initially apparent to the narrator. The most obvious is that of racism, as the neighborhood becomes less and less white. The question of who belongs there—and who has the right to decide who belongs and who doesn’t—exposes the neighborhood as far less idyllic that the narrator’s memories have made it seem; he becomes increasingly aware of this disparity the more he considers it.
Themes
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In a specific memory, one day, the narrator of “Aquifer” has dozed off, and wakes up to find Alan Mannering standing over him. Alan then urinates over him—in a perfect circle around him, not on him—and leaves without saying a word. As time goes on, the children continue playing in the swamp, and eventually, as people begin to abandon old cars nearby, the bigger children, Alan and Bruno, figure out how to cut off car roofs and use them as makeshift canoes to explore the deeper regions of the swamp. The narrator and the Box children do the same; the day after the urination incident, the narrator arrives early in the morning to canoe alone but finds Alan Mannering there, too. He tries to stand up to Alan, but Alan takes his raft and goes off into the swamp. He does not get far, however, before the narrator sees him starting to sink, and watches him drown, both of them in silence.
The story makes clear the neighborhood’s darker side with its reveal of the neighborhood’s darkest secret: Alan Mannering’s drowning. The swamp forms a physical expression of the connection between life and death, and between pleasant memories and regrets, as it both hydrates gardens and hosts Alan’s bones.
Themes
The narrator of “Aquifer” says nothing, and Alan Mannering’s body is never found. Life goes on; the narrator’s family takes a trip across Australia, the neighborhood becomes more of a genuine suburb, and families come and go. Throughout, the narrator thinks of Alan, and of water systems, imagining that Alan’s body has gotten into the aquifer and thus could be anywhere, in their vegetables, in the mosquitos, or even in the frogs. The narrator did not want Alan to die and cannot stop contemplating both his body and the many others that must also wind up in silt and mud. When the narrator turns 13, his family moves; Bruno goes back to Serbia and fights in the Yugoslav wars; one of the Box children becomes a priest.
While the narrator regrets what happened to Alan, he keeps his silence. The neighborhood’s innocence is definitively lost, however, as the subsequent changes soon show. The water systems symbolize the complex web of connections that sustain and eventually undermine the idyllic community, as those who once seemed like they belonged there leave one by one. For the narrator, these reflections are not limited to just his neighborhood—they also express a fundamental, disturbing truth about memory, community, and belonging in general.
Themes
In the present, it is the fifth year of a historic drought, drying out the swamp and revealing its contents, including Alan Mannering’s bones. The narrator of “Aquifier” looks at the dried-out swamp, and then at his old neighborhood, which is almost unrecognizable. He is surprised that no one notices him, but then wonders why they would. As he leaves, driving back toward the highway, he at last sees people he recognizes: the Jones family, who are being evicted. Reflecting on the nature of time, the narrator concludes that the past is never over, returning to and staying with us in mysterious ways.
The narrator’s reflections about memory and change are, paradoxically, all the more powerful given the total change that has taken place in the neighborhood. Though the old community that formed him has disappeared, it lives on in other, unexpected ways. The bones of Alan Mannering are the most obvious example, returning much like the narrator feared he would, through the aquifer. At the same time, continuities do exist, as the Jones family demonstrate, albeit in a darkly ironic way.
Themes
