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The Ugly Guts of Colonialism: The Exiles

26 Monday Sep 2022

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Review: The Exiles, by Christina Baker Kline
Morrow, 2020. 361 pp. $28

Australia, 1840. Mathinna, motherless eight-year-old daughter of the chief of the Lowreenne tribe, has been hiding from the white people who want to take her away. The governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) and his wife wish to keep the girl in their household to see whether they may train her “savagery” out of her. Mathinna distrusts the whole enterprise.

Mathinna, a real historical figure, as rendered in Thomas Bock’s watercolor, 1842 (courtesy http://artyzm.com/e_obraz.php?id=414 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Meanwhile, Evangeline Stokes, country vicar’s daughter and governess to a London family, has fallen afoul of her employers. A ruby ring belonging to the family is found in her possession, and in the ensuing outcry, she shoves another servant down the stairs. Never mind that her employer’s son gave Evangeline the ring, or that the child growing in her womb is his. Never mind, either, that the servant she pushed was conniving against her out of jealousy, or that the fall caused no physical injury. Larceny and attempted murder see Evangeline to Newgate Prison, from where she’s sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation to Australia.

That’s what happens when your presence embarrasses someone of wealth and social position.

The Exiles tells the story of Evangeline’s journey to Australia and her unlikely friendship with Hazel Ferguson, a young girl sentenced for stealing a silver spoon. Hazel’s streetwise where Evangeline’s an innocent. She also has marketable skills, a knowledge of midwifery and herbal remedies, learned from the mother who otherwise neglected her. Interwoven with the convict narrative is Mathinna’s life as a collected object in the governor’s house, a plaything in which her benefactors, as they believe themselves, may lose interest any moment.

Kline never lets her sympathy for her characters soften their lives; “no—and furthermore” thrives here. She also knows her ground thoroughly, re-creating the Australia of more than a century and a half ago as though it were the air her characters breathe. The ship, the prisons, the work the convicts do, the endemic cruelty and barbarity, the sanctimonious superiority from ordinary citizens and officials—all come through vividly. As a Newgate matron tells Evangeline, best not to count on anyone in life, man or woman. “The sooner you understand that, the better off you’ll be.”

Throughout, physical detail sets the scene:

There were some things she’d never get used to: the screams that spread like a contagion from one cell to the next. The vicious fistfights that broke out abruptly and ended with an inmate spitting blood or teeth. The lukewarm midday broth that floated with bony pig knuckles, snouts, bits of hooves, and hair. Moldy bread laced with maggots. Once the initial shock subsided, though, Evangeline found it surprisingly easy to endure most of the degradations and indignities of her new life: the brutish guards, the cockroaches and other parasites, the unavoidable filth, rats scurrying across the straw.

The moral and legal bankruptcy of colonialism emerges on every page, shown but not told. Kline’s too subtle an author to beat a drum; instead, she lets you hear the music for yourself, and a sorry tune it is. The counterpoint comes from the governor’s mansion, where Mathinna learns to speak French and wear fine dresses. But she’s tolerated—barely—if, and only if, she reflects the image her hosts demand. Any hint of her true identity must be erased. This represents the other side of the system that populates Australia with accused criminals, labeled savages too, though they have white skins.

The two narratives, convict and indigenous child, reveal a complex fabric of prejudices, attitudes, assumptions, determination and energy that helps build a nation. But the convicts have one advantage, an inherent paradox that gives them something to hope for. The servitude that banishes them from England, though brutal and unjust, allows them scope to make something of themselves, what they probably couldn’t have done in their homeland.

No guarantees, mind; they must survive their sentences, swallow their individuality rather than express it, see the correct opportunity should it arrive, and seize it. But Mathinna and her people, as with all the other subdued tribes, don’t even have that chance.

Beautifully written, utterly gripping, The Exiles makes a compelling story from an author unafraid to hurt her characters, a boldness I admire. My only quibble with this otherwise excellent novel is to ask where Mathinna’s narrative fits in, other than thematically, historical truth notwithstanding. I like her portion for itself, for the writing is as clear and persuasive as the rest, and Kline makes the governor, his wife, and daughter three-dimensional, flawed people instead of shapeless villains. Even so, if you remove Mathinna, the plot doesn’t change an inch, which made me question her role and wonder why it wasn’t larger than it is.

Still, that objection doesn’t diminish The Exiles, a superb novel well worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

“Lag”: Shepherd

04 Monday Jul 2022

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Review: Shepherd, by Catherine Jinks
Text Publishing, 2019. 226 pp. $30 AU

New South Wales, 1840. Tom Clay, transported to Australia at age twelve for poaching in Suffolk, has always loved animals and been good with them. It’s people he has trouble with, especially the murderous types British courts have inflicted on their infant colony in the name of justice. But as long as Tom can stick to tending sheep at the outpost station, he’s got a loyal dog, Gyp, and life’s not so bad.

John Oxley’s chart of part of the New South Wales interior, 1822, from Moreton Bay to Port Philip (courtesy State Library of New South Wales Z/Cc 82/1-3, via Wikimedia Commons)

Trouble is, Dan Carver, a fellow employee of the same rancher, has killed a couple of their coworkers and seems to be just getting started on the others. Consequently, young Tom, who, by rights, should be learning his letters in an English school, has to move fast to save his skin and that of Rowdy Cavanaugh, a glib jokester whose crime in England was passing counterfeit coin. His garrulousness, which he either can’t control or doesn’t care to, makes stealthy movement difficult if not impossible, and may cost Tom and him their lives.

I should add that the phrase by rights doesn’t exist for criminals like Tom, or for anyone else sent to Australia for punishment — “lagged,” it’s called. Therefore, even if Tom somehow manages to evade Carver and alert the rancher, he’s likely as not to hang for Carver’s murders. Nobody believes a “lag,” and when it’s one lag’s word against another, the stronger, older man will likely prevail.

As you may have guessed, this excellent thriller — I defy you to start it and put it down — has more to offer than unending sequences of “no — and furthermore,” gripping though they are. Shepherd tells the grisly, heart-breaking story of how lags come to Australia, or how Tom does, and the various stratagems he must employ to stay alive, let alone avoid flogging or any other casual brutality his masters may devise.

In beautifully crafted, brief flashbacks that seamlessly flow with the main narrative, you learn about the boy’s harrowing sea journey from England, the filthy so-called majesty of the law, and his dreadful childhood in a family of poachers: “I don’t think I’ve slept easy since I was in my mother’s womb.” Shepherd spares nothing, yet I never find the violence gratuitous or sense it’s included for shock value.

I wish the novel didn’t start with a prologue, and Jinks doesn’t need to tell the reader what’s coming, because her first chapter pulls you in right away. However, I like the writing in the prologue, which shows you much about young Tom in few words:

When I first came here, I thought it a cruel affliction to walk through a wood and not know what bird was singing, or which plants were safe to eat. Now I understand it’s more than an affliction; it’s certain death.
I see nothing around me that I can properly name. Ferns. Vines. Bushes. Trees that shed their bark instead of their leaves. Flowers with spikes instead of petals.
I’m going to die wordless, in a lonely hollow in a strange land. I’m going to die among beasts that I don’t understand and plants that have killed me.

The passage suggests both the author’s gift for spare, direct prose and characterization: “I’m going to die among beasts I don’t understand and plants that kill me.” For Tom’s a born tracker, the one advantage he possesses in his attempt to escape Carver or get the drop on him — plans and circumstances change rapidly. How the boy copes with the natural world would make a novel in itself, for his knowledge and ingenuity constantly surprise; yet, as the prologue says, he’s conscious of what he doesn’t know.

His skill and humility set him apart from the other colonists. He’s also alone in his admiration for the Black indigenous people and their understanding of the land, flora, and fauna. He fears them too, because of what they might do, though Carver’s and their boss’s treatment of them troubles Tom. There’s muted social commentary in that as well, and though the indigenous folk linger on the fringes of the narrative, you sense them watching the whites act like maniacs.

This slim volume has a lot going for it — a lightning-paced story, a landscape physically rendered in emotionally resonant detail, and a teenager fighting not only for his life, but to live decently, in a place where no one understands the concept. Few Australian novels reach our shores, unfortunately, unless a major house picks them up. I wish more Americans knew about this small press in Melbourne, Text, which has given us Shepherd and also A Room Made of Leaves, by Kate Grenville.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Coping with a Tyrant: A Room Made of Leaves

03 Monday Jan 2022

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Review: A Room Made of Leaves, by Kate Grenville
Text, 2020. 317 pp. $33AU

During Sydney’s colonial infancy in the late eighteenth century, there lived John Macarthur, a man credited with introducing the sheep breed that would make Australian wool famous, and himself, a fortune. But what if he wasn’t the innovator he claimed to be, nor a gifted leader and businessman, but merely a bully on the make who got lucky? Indeed, let’s suppose that his luckiest break, though he wouldn’t have called it that, was to marry Elizabeth Veale, who left behind a diary telling what may or may not be the real story?

Portrait of Elizabeth Macarthur, artist unknown, 1794-1796, State Library of New South Wales, presented by Sir William Dixson, 1935 (via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Such is the premise Grenville spins, and what a compelling story she derives from this tight space between truth and fiction. There was no such diary, but turning Elizabeth’s letters to England on their head, Grenville imagines the meaning between the lines as opposite to their literal sense, for, after all, husband John reads them before they cross the ocean — yes, he’s that controlling, and worse.

Through the Macarthurs’ marriage, Grenville retells the story of English colonialism in Sydney, because John is a schemer, and Elizabeth, the often appalled onlooker. The author could have overplayed this and made her protagonist a progressive thinker who rails, in her head, against the maltreatment of the indigenous populations. Rather, as a feeling person, Elizabeth has the capacity to put herself in someone else’s viewpoint, but she has few illusions that she’s any more compassionate than her countrymen, because she takes no action. That criticism may exaggerate, but it’s not far-fetched, for Elizabeth, as a victim of brutality, can surely recognize that in others.

However, relations between husband and wife drive the story. Elizabeth has wit, spirit, and excellent diplomatic survival skills, but she’s had to learn them, on the fly. Her girlhood is a series of abandonments and disappointments, leavened by her beloved grandfather, who, though inflexible in his religious and moral code, encourages his granddaughter to have an inner life and to love nature. Unbeknownst to her, these are two essential weapons in her war of self-defense against her future brute of a husband.

I won’t reveal how she becomes shackled to such a blight on the human race, but I will tell you that the key pleasure in A Room Made of Leaves comes from Elizabeth’s slow but steady education. Catering to his view of her, and of women in general, she pretends to be incapable of serious thought, by which she learns to placate, flatter, outwit, and soothe John, who’s half as smart as he thinks he is. His greatest talent consists of hatching conspiracies to ruin men who haven’t treated him like “a gentleman.” As is often the case with malicious snobs, he knows he has no real claim to that status, and he takes pleasure in his successful cabals, the more vicious, the better.

He’s just as dangerous at home, where he expects complete fealty. Elizabeth takes steps not to change him — heavens, no — but to protect herself as best she can, enough to create a place in her mind where she views herself as worthy, capable, and by no means powerless. That the power largely exists in thought and outlook may not seem like much, at first glance. But Elizabeth’s triumph is that no matter how Macarthur imprisons her in his iron fist, she’s free to think what she likes. And, once in a while, to do more than that.

That’s the inner life her grandfather fostered in her. As for the nature, that’s Australia itself. Interestingly, among the few English residents of Sydney who aren’t convicts, such as the Macarthurs (he’s a military officer), practically no one besides Elizabeth even seems to notice how beautiful the land is. In one of her favorite spots, the room named in the title, she realizes how the scenery can help her spirit:

Each step [down] revealed a new marvel: a view through the bushes of a slice of harbour rough and blue like lapis, a tree with bark of such a smooth pink fleshiness that you could expect it to be warm, an overhang of rock with a fraying underside, soft as cake, that glowed yellow. The wind brought with it the salt of the ocean and the strange spicy astringency given off by the shrubs and flowers. There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time.

Since A Room Made of Leaves purports to be a diary, the chapters are very short, sometimes only a page. I’ve never liked that style of narrative, which can easily become fragmented, offering undeveloped, shallow bits. But here, Grenville creates a cohesive whole, and though the individual scenes may feel cut short, the ensemble achieves a profound depth. I recommend this novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Father’s Long Shadow: The Dickens Boy

01 Monday Nov 2021

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Review: The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally
Atria, 2021. 399 pp. $28

In 1868, Edward Dickens, the tenth child of the famous author, emigrates to Australia to learn the sheep business. Just shy of his seventeenth birthday, he arrives with far more psychological baggage than physical possessions. Besides the name he can’t possibly live up to, which prompts everyone he meets to draw faulty conclusions about him, he has failed to apply himself at everything he’s ever attempted, save cricket. As he is all too aware, he doesn’t appear promising material. He also bears the cultural, social, and religious prejudices you’d expect of a righteous Victorian, some of which may work against him in the outback.

Edward Dickens, in an 1868 portrait, photographer unknown (courtesy
http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/distant-paradise-dickens, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But young Plorn, as the family calls him — an abbreviation of an immense nickname — has two advantages. He desires to learn and will take instruction from anyone; and he has his older brother, Alfred, who has preceded him to Australia. That Alfred is named for Tennyson, and Plorn, for Edward Bulwer Lytton (who wrote, “It was a dark and stormy night”), hints at the burden they carry. But for Plorn, it’s even worse, because the entire continent seems composed of people who have memorized his father’s works and suppose he has done the same, when, in fact, he has never read a word of them.

From this ingenious premise, Keneally spins a delightful, often hilarious, wide-ranging coming-of-age novel. You have the usual themes, such as sexual awakening, learning to adjust abstract moral sense to real-life circumstances, and how to judge another person in his or her fullness, allowing for their imperfections. To that, add what it means to be a family outcast in a country colonized by outcasts. Plorn is convinced that Father sent him away out of love, but Alfred is less sure, and their differing points of view about that, and their father’s character, cause conflict. This issue occupies Plorn throughout the novel.

Plorn may adapt rather rapidly, perhaps conveniently, but you have to admire how he lets his insistence that he has none of his father’s gifts stand for the wish to be taken as his own man. Inwardly, he has doubts about who that man is, but he derives warmth and satisfaction from people saluting his individuality — welcome to the democracy of the outback. He also has enough sense to avoid employers to whom he has an introduction and seek someone more to his liking, at which he succeeds admirably.

Fred Bonney, who manages a sheep station with intelligent tolerance, teaches young Plorn all he needs to know about sheep ranching and encourages his rise. A better mentor would be hard to find, and if Fred happens to be the one rancher who tries to understand and befriend the Indigenous people (though unapologetic about having taken their land), consider that a lucky Dickensian coincidence. But Keneally makes the most of it, and even when the story turns harsh, even murderous, kindness isn’t far away. That too is a theme, whether humans are innately evil with occasional good impulses, or good with occasional evil ones.

Keneally wishes to celebrate the frontier ethic, in which a person’s deeds and capabilities often, but not always, matter more than his or her birth. As such, you can pretty much tell the good guys from the bad guys without a scorecard, and they seldom do anything to challenge the judgment; perhaps that’s Dickensian too. However, laughter levels that broad-brush approach, with a theatrical tone that Dickens himself might have admired.

Naturally, a girl figures in the story, and though I wish the adjective pretty did not introduce her every appearance, I like how Keneally portrays Plorn’s sexual confusion:

All apart from the native women were males in this enormous acreage, and that suited me fairly well at nearly seventeen, when the idea of a future beloved, a woman of vapor, had certainly arisen in me but with no urgency to see her in the flesh. I had decided that women in the flesh were a challenge to the callow, whether they represented an uncomplaining wistfulness like Mama, a sturdy and overriding competence like Aunt Georgie, or a jovial irreverence like my clever sister Kate. Papa had nicknamed Katie ‘Lucifer Box’ for her capacity to flare, but she had married Wilkie Collins’s sickly brother, Charlie, a fellow who seemed to have no fire at all.

You can sort of see why Plorn has never read his father’s novels, given that so many literary icons populated his youth.

The Dickens Boy is a thoroughly enjoyable novel. I would have wanted more variation within some of the characters to match the way the author poses moral problems, as shades of gray. But it’s a wonderful book nonetheless.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in different, shorter form.

Convict Ship: Dangerous Women

07 Monday Jun 2021

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Review: Dangerous Women, by Hope Adams
Berkeley, 2021. 320 pp. $26

The Rajah sets sail from London in 1841 with one hundred eighty women on board, all convicted of crimes bearing the punishment of transportation. In what’s widely seen as great mercy, they’ll get a chance to redeem themselves in Australia. The modern reader considers that and wonders what kind of society banishes people for petty thievery; Adams wants us to see that irony.

Not that these convicts are easy to like. They’re a rough lot, most of them, cynical about the world that has given them the back of its hand and the men who run it, with good reason. Combative, hard, and schooled not to show tender feeling, they expect cruelty and can dish it out. And indeed one does, for a woman is stabbed, and as she lies comatose, her life in the balance, wheels turn.

Augustus Earle’s watercolor, ca. 1826, of a so-called penitentiary factory, where transported women worked and/or were kept imprisoned until further assignment, and where free women also labored (courtesy National Library of Australia via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Captain Ferguson decides that before the Rajah reaches Van Diemen’s Land, the attacker’s identity must be found. To assist him, he has Mr. Davies, a clergyman; Mr. Donovan, a naval surgeon; and Kezia Hayter, a proper middle-class woman who serves as matron for the women aboard, and through whose eyes Adams tells much of the narrative.

Kezia had always thought of Hell as a place of leaping fire and demons with pitchforks, but the first time she’d entered a prison, she’d changed her mind. The damp, squalid cells in Millbank Prison, where women cried out and uttered obscene words, where there was no bright color, only gray and brown and black, that had seemed a new kind of Hell, the opposite of everything that was pleasant and good. The sunshine, when it found a way through the high, grimy windows, had cast no more than a pale glimmer on floors filthy with dropped food, spilled slop buckets and rat droppings. What light there was illuminated tear-streaked cheeks, lank hair and eyes full of grief.

From the get-go, Davies, who looks down on women in general and female convicts most of all, wonders why Kezia even has an opinion about the inquiry or why she should be allowed to express it. Donovan and Ferguson, pointing out her knowledge of the women, seem more thoughtful and accepting — rather too much, I think — but for most of the novel, it hardly matters. All the women questioned give the same account of the stabbing, and the investigators uncover little they didn’t already know.

Nothing like a shipboard murder — or murder attempt — to propel a narrative, and among women who’ve led desperate lives and have no idea what awaits them in Australia, there’s much potential for tension. Kezia has also come aboard with a mission: to select enough capable needlewomen among the convicts to make a quilt. She hopes that producing a work of beauty will uplift her charges, and that communal labor (accompanied by hymns) will lead them on a more righteous path.

However, despite the possibilities, Dangerous Women founders, maybe because Adams tries to do too much. She wants us to know, in detail, how the women come to be there, and how the legal system discriminates against the poor, women worst of all. Fair enough. But these biographies neither advance the plot nor create much tension; they’re often intriguing, but no more than that, and sometimes rely too heavily on interior monologue. That makes me wonder whether pieces of that information, and certainly the themes and attitudes depicted, could have been replicated on board ship, skipping much of the back story.

Rather, to accommodate these women’s histories, the narrative keeps cutting away from the present, the tried-and-true diversion to create tension, but which here proves false, merely annoying. The mystery plot, which begins with such promise, loses steam and never really recovers. I get the impression that Adams cares more about the quilt and the women’s pasts. But if so, why have the mystery at all? It only sets up expectations that a hasty, convenient confession toward the end does little to satisfy, a trite convention unworthy of such a premise.

I’d have liked Dangerous Women better had the novel concentrated on two or three characters, deepened them, intertwined their shipboard lives, and played out the mystery concurrent with revelations about the past. All the suspects have every reason to mistrust their fellows and the law. Had Kezia assumed a more active (or effective) role as sleuth, admittedly difficult for a Victorian woman who takes her religion neat—but nevertheless possible given her character—she’d have discovered truths about the women’s lives. That would have given her the chance to wrestle with more challenges, let her grow more fully.

As it is, Adams focuses on Kezia’s own reasons for wishing to leave England and her struggle to make her voice heard as a woman. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. But that limitation holds back the narrative, which never rises above an occasionally enlightening window on poor women’s lives in mid-nineteenth century England. The novel could have offered so much more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Blame the Woman: No Small Shame

17 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: No Small Shame, by Christine Bell
Impact, 2020. 396 pp. AU $33

When fifteen-year-old Mary O’Donnell emigrates from Scotland to Australia in 1914, besides the promise of a more prosperous life, she’s hoping to taste a thin wedge of freedom, like a good pie — and to be reunited with her childhood crush, Liam Merrilees. But there’s precious little money waiting in this sparse landscape for Mary or her family, Further, Liam has lost the fire in his eyes, though not his self-involvement. When he’s not being outright brutal toward Mary, he shows absolutely no interest in her, but she’s the only one who can’t see it. She’s used to being kicked. Mary’s mother has bruised her all her life, and not just emotionally; daughter accepts this as her lot.

From this premise, you can predict where the narrative will go most of the time. You know that Mary won’t give up on Liam, that mother will never stop ripping into her, and that vile prophecies will bear fruit, evoking more than one trope. Yet the novel works, more or less, because Mary struggles to slip between the Catholic hellfire her mother has taught her to fear and the life she’s dreamed of leading. Her awakening from masochism won’t happen overnight, nor will the world spin any differently for it, but Mary’s interior journey is far less ordained than her exterior one.

The background fits too. First World War Australia, though distant from both Gallipoli and the Western Front, where its volunteers have gone, has its own battlegrounds, starting with that word volunteer. The country has no conscription, but the number of white feathers handed out to able-bodied men not in uniform, based on the grotesque assumption that real men never shirk a fight, takes a heavy emotional toll, on Liam as on others. The lengthy casualty lists don’t seem to make a dent, either; if some men have been slaughtered, it’s up to the rest to avenge them, even if nobody really knows concretely what the war’s about. Throw in wartime price inflation, the wages that haven’t kept pace, and strife between Catholic and Protestant, you’ve got quite a vortex of problems. Incidentally, Mary’s mother relishes the religious conflict, in her perverse way. She’s a piece of work.

I like this aspect of No Small Shame, the everyday burdens that twist life in ways that no one could have imagined when the trumpets sounded. Not least are the burdens that women bear, silently and without question, for it’s their job to make sure their men are happy and feel supported, no matter what sacrifice that entails. And you guessed it: Mary takes the brunt, though she’s not alone.

Bell’s prose is simple yet effective, as with Mary’s first glimpse of her new home:

Where were the fabulous fields and plump livestock waiting for lads and farmers promised by the immigration agent in Motherwell offering assisted passages to sunny Australia? All Mary could see extending beyond the train windows was blade after blade of grass bleached colourless as sand in a desert. The poor animals in the endless paddocks were without a leaf of shade or drip of water. She couldn’t guess how any of them survived.

Less convincing, I find, are the characterizations. Maw, her mother, is well drawn. As for Mary, it’s not easy to portray a slow transformation to selfhood, and Bell succeeds, mostly, barring shaky instances that don’t quite make sense to me. Liam, though predictable, has edges. He’s never learned to move past self-pity or reckon with who he is, and though he wants to do better, he can’t. Unfortunately, the reader knows what Mary doesn’t, that he’ll never change. I wish Bell hadn’t tried to redeem him, which I don’t believe, and which I think actually demeans his stature, renders him less tragic.

The children in these pages are idealized, not like any I’ve ever met. Ditto Tom, a Protestant friend of Mary’s who holds a candle for her, which she’s remarkably slow to recognize. He’s a nice guy and treats her kindly, but he’s cardboard, and since he’s crucial to the story, his opacity hurts the narrative. As a man with a medical condition that prevents him from enlisting, he embodies the shame men feel, just as Mary represents women that way. That’s not enough.

Nevertheless, despite these objections, I should point out how unusual No Small Shame is among First World War novels with a female protagonist, a narrow field to begin with. Mary’s neither nurse nor bandage roller nor factory worker nor her country’s soul, keeping the home fires burning. I like that. For that reason, you may find this novel worth reading.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the author through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

From Auschwitz to Australia: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

08 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman
Putnam, 2018. 293 pp. $26

Dutiful, reliable, bewildered by life, unsure what happiness is or whether he’s ever experienced it, that’s Tom Hope — until he meets Hannah Babel. Hometown, Australia, has never seen anything like her, and even in 1968, the changes sweeping the West seem to have skipped this rural, agrarian corner of Down Under. Hannah, an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (a phrase probably seldom used, but it fits) plans to open a bookshop, of all things, and she hires Tom, a sheep rancher and orchardist, to do welding and carpentry to prepare for the opening. She’s utterly mercurial, older than he by fifteen years, speaks inflected English he can’t always fathom, and when she lets her canary, David, fly freely, the bird settles on Tom’s shoulder, further discomfiting him.

Hannah settles on him too, in a passionate rush that made me think, for a moment, that The Bookshop of the Brokenhearted derives from a male fantasy. But no; though their instant mutual attraction burns intensely, plenty of obstacles stand between them, least of which is that Tom has never read a book. A few years before, Tom married Trudy, a psychologically unstable woman who has left him, twice, and scarred him so badly that happiness is “a fugitive,” to “be roused to confidence, encouraged,” but, if grasped too strongly, might “slip back into the shadows, forever.” (Trudy’s legacy continues in other ways, but I don’t want to reveal too much.) Hannah has had two husbands, both dead, but she suffered her worst loss at Auschwitz, which stays with her, always. Metaphorically, that loss connects her to Trudy, something that neither Tom nor Hannah expected.

Poddy lambs, or orphans, drinking milk at a sheep station (ranch) in Australia (courtesy Figaro at English Wikipedia)

In lesser hands, a premise like this could easily turn sticky with treacle, melodrama, clichéd predictability, or a combination of these. Books, bookshops, and libraries are a hot thing in fiction these days, soon to be a trope, perhaps. Nevertheless, nothing happens here without second thoughts, reversals, mixed feelings, and a sense of dread, collectively the best tonic for treacle. Hillman never loses sight of his characters’ age, maturity, or makeup, and his narrative takes no adolescent flights of fancy, relying on simple prose, grounded in the everyday, again staying in character. Consider this passage early on, just after Trudy leaves, and Tom, in his workshop, wonders whether she’ll write:

With the soldering, it was the work of a good two hours. An old, demented ram he treated as a friend butted him repeatedly as he sanded and primed — not hard, just affectionately. And Beau [his dog] in turn chewed on the old ram’s leg. Tom asked himself aloud: ‘What do you expect her [Trudy] to say to you, you nong? “Hello, it’s a nice day?” For God’s sake.’ He was a practical person who never thought of fate and things that were meant to be. He could take apart an engine, stand surrounded by its thousand parts, find what was causing the problem, put the engine back together. He might daydream, but he knew that the dreams were foolish.

How can you resist a scene like that, which shows another side to a man not given to reflection?

Besides the treacle, it would be easy for a writer to adopt Hannah as a Jew of convenience, visible to a knowledgeable reader as unfamiliar with her own faith, which she’s also conveniently let slide. That’s a favorite device, as I’ve noted before in other posts. But Hillman knows his ground, rendering Hannah’s flashbacks with authority and depicting her Jewishness as well as the casual anti-Semitism of Tom’s neighbors. But their reaction is an aside; Tom has never heard of Auschwitz and has the barest notions of the Holocaust, about which Hannah refuses to tell him. So it’s the hidden past that lies between them, not what the neighbors say, about which Tom wouldn’t care anyway.

Names matter in this novel, at times too obviously. Tom Hope? Check. Does Babel refer to the tower of, given Hannah’s multilingual, sometimes chaotic persona; or Isaac, the great Russian writer murdered by Stalin? No question where Pastor Bligh comes from, a vicious, self-righteous disciplinarian who lives up to his namesake, except that he’s incompetent at his job. I have no sympathy for fundamentalist Christian cultist lunatic sadists, and I suppose that’s fair. Yet I want this man to have a three-dimensional rendering, and he doesn’t get one.

Even so, that’s the major glitch in The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, a warm, satisfying, decidedly unsticky novel, which I highly recommend.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Rough Injustice: Only Killers and Thieves

14 Monday May 2018

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Review: Only Killers and Thieves, by Paul Howarth
HarperCollins, 2018. 319 pp. $27

It’s 1885, and Billy and Tommy McBride, Australian teenagers in a drought-ridden wilderness, have grown up within the confines of their family’s failing cattle ranch. They’ve met few people other than their parents, younger sister, and hired hands, and they’ve felt themselves secure within that society. So when the boys return home one afternoon following a rare moment of leisure, an excursion to a swimming hole, they see that they are bereft beyond their imagining. Someone has murdered their parents, gravely wounded their sister, and even killed the dogs.

Suspicion immediately falls on a former Aboriginal hired hand who’d left the McBrides’ employ under a cloud, and whose distinctive pistol is found at the scene. At least, sixteen-year-old Billy’s convinced of the man’s guilt, precisely what the McBrides’ wealthy neighbor, John Sullivan, wants to hear. He’s a rancher who seems to own everything and everyone, hates anyone who’s not white, and anyone of any race who doesn’t pledge him fealty, which he calls “respect.” Sullivan hires a police officer and his Aboriginal troops to hunt down the killer, and he insists that both boys come along. But Tommy, almost fifteen and forever in his older brother’s shadow, isn’t so sure. He mistrusts Sullivan, with whom his father never got along, and, unlike his older brother, wants to know the how and why of things.

I like this facet of the novel very much, how the interplay between the brothers sets so much into motion. Billy, pigheaded and more terrified than he’s willing to admit, accepts all he’s told as the only choice and refuses to ask questions — sometimes the obvious ones. After all, the McBride boys are orphans, and as minors, they have no rights to hold their deceased parents’ property. Tommy acquiesces because he can’t exist on his own, idealizes Billy, and wants just as much to be accepted. Yet he keeps a skeptical mind about what doesn’t make sense, including details of the murder that don’t add up. And he tries to ask questions, only to be shouted down or threatened.

But Howarth is after bigger game than sibling rivalry, however deadly it may turn. He aims to explore how murder — what today would be called genocide — can happen, and how decent people can subscribe to it. So far, so good, but I wish the author hadn’t stacked the deck. Sullivan speaks and acts the way I imagine such a man might, yet his villainy and lust for power seem too grand and without nuance. (There’s also a Freudian cliché employed to explain why he throws his weight around, but it’s too cheap by half.) Far more interesting, and complex, is Noone, the police officer Sullivan hires.

At first, Noone cultivates Tommy, whom he senses has an astute, roving intelligence like his own. To Tommy’s surprise, Noone even answers questions about Sullivan’s questionable activities, the boy having assumed that the two men trust one another, if they’re not actually friends. But Tommy soon learns that Noone trusts no one and has no human feeling as the boy (and just about anyone) would define it. Noone’s a thinker, a theoretical follower of Darwin who’s twisted “survival of the fittest” to his murderous agenda. His kind is timeless; call him proto-fascist, white supremacist, sociopath, or all three.

One of the pleasures of Only Killers and Thieves is the way Howarth’s prose brings out the struggle for survival, the isolation, the loneliness of this hardscrabble patch of earth. Consider this passage, when Tommy and his mother drive to the nearest town:

The dray rattled along, Mother holding her hat against the wind, Tommy squinting into the glare, both of them grimacing at the ride. There was no give in the axle. Every rock and divot jarred through the bench. Before them the road stretched straight and narrow, little more than a horse track beaten through the bush, but the only road Bewley had. It ran through the center of town and continued east for hundreds of miles, supposedly to the mountains then the coast and an ocean so big it covered half the earth. Tommy could hardly imagine it. But then the same could be said of the interior, which no man had ever crossed; must have been the size of an ocean at least. The thought made him woozy: the scale of it all, what lay out there, the world.

Only Killers and Thieves lives up to its title, a grisly, powerful, unflinching book, the type you don’t want to put down but fear to pick up once you have because of what might happen next. After a taut, laconic narrative, however, the climax gets talky, with Noone spewing stuff that seems pulled out of Nietzsche, irrelevant and redundant. The entire dénouement, in fact, feels stilted and arranged.

But Only Killers and Thieves is a brilliant novel, more remarkable for being Howarth’s first. I think he’s an author to watch.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post was published in shorter, different form.

A Ship of Fools: Dangerous Crossing

08 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: Dangerous Crossing, by Rachel Rhys
Atria, 2018. 351 pp. $26

In late July 1939, Lily Shepard sails from her native England to Australia, among other young women recruited for domestic service (and duly chaperoned). Like her half-dozen peers and, indeed, most everyone else on the Orontes, Lily’s escaping a crushing disappointment, or trying to. Only it seems that her past haunts her in new guises, whether it’s the same sort of unsuitable man to whom she’s drawn or increasingly complicated moral decisions that seem all too familiar. And though Lily doesn’t realize it, or prefers not to, the world is sliding rapidly toward war.

It’s hard to read this novel without recalling Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, which featured a similar collection of thwarted escapists butting heads against their shortcomings or one another en route to prewar Nazi Germany. But Dangerous Crossing has its own pleasures, chief among them the psychological suspense. A prologue, which jumps ahead to when the ship docks in Australia, reveals that a crime has been committed on board. After finishing the book, I understand why Rhys has done this, and it’s extremely clever, but Dangerous Crossing isn’t a mystery per se.

The narrative derives its considerable tension from Lily’s confused attempts to understand her fellow passengers’ behavior, especially that of a young man who seems attracted to her, yet inexplicably blows hot and cold. She’s particularly vulnerable, because, in her last domestic situation, the young man of the house nearly seduced her with false claims of love, only to abandon her and damage someone else. Also puzzling are the Campbells, two wealthy, spoiled libertines rumored to have a scandalous past. They’ve clearly offended their fellows in first class and force themselves on Lily’s circle a deck below. The Campbells treat her and her friends like playthings, but she’s fascinated, despite herself. Then there’s a Jewish woman who just managed to get out of Austria, but who hasn’t heard from her family and who’s being persecuted by an unidentified enemy on board — or is it, as the ship’s many anti-Semites suggest, her fantasies?

As these puzzles proliferate and deepen in complexity, conflicting social prejudices and mores emerge. Rhys excels here, portraying class divisions and various shades of racial bigotry and anti-Semitism, turning the Orontes into a microcosm of a hate-filled world pole-vaulting toward catastrophe. In these circumstances, a lesser writer would content herself with stereotypes, but Rhys takes the high road, peeling away layers of bitterness and jealousy to reveal the yearnings underneath. Lily, too, has her moral failures, though I wish Rhys had plumbed her nascent envy a little further.

Rhys sets her scene well, both in ports of call and aboard ship:

After dinner there is a palpable frisson in the air as the band sets up… Though she hasn’t had anything to drink, Lily nevertheless feels intoxicated. It’s a mixture of the music and the beautiful clothes, the silks and velvets and chiffons, the peacock greens and sapphire blues, the russets and magentas; of the different fragrances, so recently applied, that mingle in the heady air — musks and florals and citruses, the woody smell of the cigar smokers.… And, above all that, the awareness that they are here on this floating world, apart from all other worlds, bound all of them by the country they have come from and the one they are going to, and by all the thousands of miles of travel that lie in between.

Dangerous Crossing feels entirely comfortable in its portrayal of 1939, and yet it’s the author’s first historical novel, so kudos there. I wish, though, she hadn’t told her story mostly in the present tense, because the shifts in time are sometimes jarring. Beyond that, though, she’s so sure-handed that I wonder why she included the prologue. Did she fear that her depiction of the competitive shipboard atmosphere, intensified by the heat of the southern latitudes, would fail to hold the reader? Did she not trust her skill at creating suspense without revealing that a crime has taken place?

Read Dangerous Crossing and decide for yourself.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Child Love: The Light Between Oceans

24 Monday Jul 2017

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Review: The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman
Scribner, 2012. 343 pp. $25

Tom Sherbourne returns to his native Australia after the First World War deeply disturbed by what he saw and did and seeking solitude. He has nothing and no one to hold onto, and he finds what he thinks is the perfect job, tending a lighthouse on a forlorn island off the Australian coast. There, no one will ask him about his past, and his exacting, meticulous duties will keep him busy for the months that stretch between brief shore leaves.

Tom wonders why he survived the war when so many others didn’t or came home physically or emotionally maimed. But that’s not the only trauma to trouble his dreams. His mother left home when he was a young boy–or did his father, a cold tyrant with no access to any feelings except anger, throw her out? Either way, both have passed from Tom’s life, and his brother Cecil, the favored son due to inherit the family business, is equally unapproachable in Tom’s eyes, though it’s not clear why. But it’s enough to know that Tom Sherbourne has no family to speak of, or to.

Supplies being unloaded for South Solitary Island lighthouse, Australia, 1946, unknown photographer (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

However, on shore leave, he meets Isabelle Graysmark, a spirited, adventurous young woman, and they’re immediately attracted. Tom, much older and badly bruised, distrusts the vulnerability where tender feelings lead, and she practically has to convince him to marry her. He dares hope that Izzy will be his reward, however undeserved, for having survived a miserable childhood and the war. For her part, Izzy believes implicitly that she couldn’t have found a more loyal, steadfast, and loving husband, or a more nurturing father for their children. She only wishes he’d tell her what happened to him before they met.

To their delight, Izzy becomes pregnant almost immediately but miscarries–and again, and again. Each time, she blames herself, and what’s worse, she can’t understand his reaction. He aches for her, he’s sad and sorry, but he’s not devastated for himself. He cherishes their lives together as the first tenderness he’s ever known, a gift that many soldiers serving under him never got the chance to receive. He understands what she doesn’t, that life is often unfair, and that there’s no malign intent involved or blame to pass around, only bad luck and circumstance. But Izzy thinks his gratitude for what they have means that he’s cold and hurtful, incapable of feeling. And one night, when a rowboat lands near the lighthouse carrying a dead man and a young infant, the Sherbournes make a desperate decision that will mark their lives and others’.

The Light Between Oceans is an accomplished novel, and Stedman’s first. At its best, the narrative touches the lyrical and depth of insight and makes them one. Consider Tom’s first view of the island, before he meets Izzy:

Hundreds of feet above sea level, he was mesmerized by the drop to the ocean crashing against the cliffs directly below. The water sloshed like white paint, milky-thick, the foam occasionally scraped off long enough to reveal a deep blue undercoat. At the other end of the island, a row of immense boulders created a break against the surf and left the water inside it as calm as a bath. He had the impression he was hanging from the sky, not rising from the earth. Very slowly, he turned a full circle, taking in the nothingness of it all. It seemed his lungs could never be large enough to breathe in this much air, his eyes could never see this much space, nor could he hear the full extent of the rolling, roaring ocean. For the briefest moment, he had no edges.

It’s a good novelist who can make beautiful sentences draw the reader into a character’s inner life without calling attention to themselves. And in focusing her characters on the most primal attachment, that for a child, Stedman evokes tremendous power from a relatively simple story. I say relatively because she requires more coincidence and suspension of disbelief than I like, but once you get past that, there’s no denying the passions or the moral issues involved.

I have a harder time getting around Izzy’s character. I like how the spontaneous girlishness hides other, dangerous levels, but–without giving away too much–I think she becomes unglued, and by the time I finished the book, I didn’t like her much. Liking a main character isn’t requisite, but I wanted to feel more sympathy for her than I did, and I might have, had she struggled with the momentous decision that drives the narrative or consider how it might affect someone else. Instead, she sets her mind and seldom thinks about it again–refuses to, even.

All the same, Stedman’s a very good writer, and The Light Between Oceans will make you think.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.