Sarah Thornhill (2011) – Kate GRENVILLE

Kate Grenville’s follow-up to The Secret River and The Lieutenant has no doubt been anticipated by many people, though it appears to have been released to not a great deal of fanfare. And with a terrible cover. Why this is, I don’t know. Grenville is one of the best Australian novelists working at the moment, and her stuff – particularly her historical stuff – always provides an interesting view on Australian history, and what it means to be an Australian now.

Sarah Thornhill has grown up on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, with her rather large family. Her father, William Thornhill, has made a life for them, despite being a former convict, and wants his children to be better than he could ever be. But when Sarah realises she loves Jack Langland, a friend of her brother’s, a man whose mother was Aboriginal, she doesn’t realise the implications this relationship will have on her family, on Jack, and on the way she views the world.

Readers be warned: as opposed to The Lieutenant, which picks up some of the themes and ideas, this is a direct sequel to The Secret River, so while you probably don’t have to have read the first in order to enjoy this, certain events in the former are vitally important to understanding the message that Grenville is trying to get across here.

The love story central to the beginning of the novel is quite well done, and I like the idea of what’s going on here. I mentioned when I reviewed Caleb’s Crossing, I was glad Brooks didn’t go for the obvious “white girl falls in love with untouchable native man” story. But that feels more comfortable here, particularly when their love does come out – the idea that Jack is a good man, up until the point of sleeping with a white girl, is vital to the story here, and fits in with Grenville’s explorations of the white/black Australia relationship. Jack leaves Sarah when he is told something by her mother, something that enrages him so much, he can no longer stand to be around Sarah or her family, and he disappears off into the river, assumingly never to be seen again.

Rachel – the girl “rescued” from her New Zealand family, and brought kicking and screaming into white Australia is interesting, too. The bastard daughter of Sarah’s older brother, she is brought to the Hawkesbury on the whim of William Thornhill who, as it turns out, is a man wracked with guilt over the events of The Secret River. He wants to atone for his mistakes, and for him, the best way to do that is to take this girl, and give her a “proper” life, away from the savages of her maternal family. Unsurprisingly, this is not a good idea, and the attempts to “civilise” Rachel will be familiar to those who are in any way familiar with the history of the Stolen Generation. Sarah is uncomfortable with this course of action – having seen what= happened to Jack, who in many ways is a precursor to Rachel – but is unable to do anything about it, caught up in her own worries.

We eventually discover what Sarah’s mother said to Jack, forcing him to leave the picture – that William Thornhill is responsible for the massacre that killed his family and tribe – Grenville’s message begins to come into focus. Sarah’s reaction to this, the fact that she is part of a society built on a cruel and unusual turning point, is perhaps what we, as modern Australians should feel when we, too, realise the same thing. Sarah’s grief at hearing about the massacre is tangible, and forces her to consider what it means to be a white Australian – as someone born to English parents in New South Wales, she has never known any other home, but at the same time, her feelings of guilt force her to question her place in this land.

Her reactions to this guilt will no doubt be familiar to many of us – she begins to hand out food and clothing to the Aboriginal tribes living around her property, as though this one act of charity will absolve her of all past wrongs. Of course, this has no effect on anything, and deep down, Sarah knows this. The only way forward is to right the wrongs for which she is directly responsible. In this case, it means doing something to absolve herself of the problem of Rachel. Sarah’s actions may be surprising to some readers, but I think it makes a lot of sense, and her own turmoil – whether to stay with her happy family, or be a part of something much bigger – plays a large part in this final act.

So much in Sarah Thornhill is about guilt – the guilt white Australians feel about . And this is what historical fiction at its best should be – a story about the past that informs and comments on contemporary society. Grenville offers some answers to this guilt, but nothing so concrete as to preach. Her message of understanding, and of truthfully telling the past, is one that resonated with me, and hopefully will resonate with the wider Australian, and international, readership.

Oh, and there’s a hilariously bitchy comment in the afterward, where Grenville snipes at her critics (no doubt Inga Clendinnen at the front of her mind), and reminds us all that this is a work of fiction, not of historiography. Amazing.

The Secret River (2005) – Kate GRENVILLE

This book appeared on my reading list for English this semester, and it has been such a long time since I read it, I decided to reread it – something I don’t do very often these days. So, yes, this is the first reread on this blog, and there will probably be a few more before the year is out. I remember referencing The Secret River a lot when I reviewed The Lieutenant, so we’ll see how those comments match up now.

In England, William Thornhill is a man condemned to death. Waiting to be hanged for a petty crime, he is saved by his wife, and the two of them, with their young son, are shipped out to the fledgling colony of New South Wales. When they arrive, William is caught up in the beauty of the land, and decides to move his growing family to the Hawkesbury to make a living. When local Aboriginal tribes cause them problems, however, everything starts going horribly wrong.

I remember loving this book the first time I read it – about two and a half years ago. I was expecting it to be overrated, considering the hype around it at the time, but I do remember loving it a lot. Is that love still there? I think maybe not as much as before. Reading this in the context of the work I’m doing at university about Aboriginal perspectives in literature, I can’t help but feel this book fails to realise it at all. What it does do brilliantly, though, is create a character you sympathise with totally, understand perfectly his motives for doing what he is doing, and by the end of the novel, you just want him to be happy. William’s history in London and the way he was treated by society there gives him the impetus to want to be an independent person when he comes to New South Wales but, of course, there are other people already there.

Other than this excellent central character, Grenville gives us a plot that unfolds perfectly. To be fair, the beginning is very slow, and I personally found the first two parts, set in London, to be pretty uneventful and stock-standard historical novel fare. It does, however, make sense in the course of the novel for her to go this far back to explain what happens later. The book really kicks off, though, in the later parts, where William is desperately trying to keep his sanity, family and new farm under control, along with the threat (real or imagined) of Aboriginals, and the craziness of the other people that live on the river. The psychological games between the two sides of this story grow and grow in complexity, until everything comes crashing down. Grenville devotes an entire section to the confrontation between the settlers and the Aboriginals, and it, more than anything else, is the reason you should read this book. It’s so beautifully done, you feel sorry for everyone. This gives the ending a sense of uneasiness, of incompleteness – while William has ‘won’, and becomes a successful settler, he is haunted by what he has done, and there is this sense of deep unhappiness. William himself realises that he can never be truly connected to this land as the original owners were.

Kate Grenville has come under fire for grafting 21st century sensibilities onto her characters in this novel. I’d just like to dispel that myth now. While Thornhill is perhaps more likely to question whether or not the extermination of an entire race is necessary, he still participates fully in the eventual acts, and the end of the novel places him firmly in the ‘killer’ camp.

Questions, also, of this novel providing justification for the genocide of the Australian Aboriginals are, however, more tricky. Certainly this book provides us with a sympathetic white main character, without providing balance on the other side. But perhaps that’s the whole point of the novel – there was never any chance for dialogue between the two sides. It was always a matter of the settlers inducing violence, it was a just a question of when it would start to happen. And with Thornhill, the pressure from the people around him (who are also very nicely drawn, and are perhaps your more typical white settlers of the time) to act in response to what is going on meant that he was always going to be murdering. This, more than anything, is, I think, what this book is about.

So, yes, this book is still almost as good as I remember it. It certainly made some waves at the time, and hopefully will continue to do so. Definitely a future Australian classic.

The Lieutenant (2008) – Kate GRENVILLE

Ah, the joys of working in a bookshop. This book is embargoed until later this month, but I managed to get my grubby little hands on an advance copy, since I am a big fan of Kate Grenville. And by that, I mean I, like everyone else, was swept away by The Secret River, despite never having heard of her before. To be honest, before I started reading this, my bosses had told me that they didn’t like it very much, and after reading the blurb, I was worried she was trying to cash in on the formula that made The Secret River so popular.

The eponymous Lieutenant is Thomas Rooke, a man sent to the penal colony of New South Wales on the First Fleet, not as a convict, but as a Navy marine. While previous experiences in the Navy conflict with his highly scientific mind, and his hopes of becoming an astronomer, he hopes for the best in this new land. However, once the Fleet arrives, Rooke separates himself from the rest of the settlers, and begins to discover that this land is full of far more surprises than passing comets.

Ok, I have to get this out of the way first. Yes. Kate Grenville has written a novel very similar to The Secret River. But no, that does not make it bad. While the elements that made her last novel so good (well, the bits I liked, anyway) are present again in this novel, they both feel very different. Both feature solitary males going out into the Australian bush in the beginnings of white Australian history, and both deal with their interaction with the Aboriginal populations. While The Secret History, however, deals with this on a far more intense and psychological level, The Lieutenant, while certainly not a happy book, seems almost to have a sense of defeat, right from the beginning. The scenes of Rooke happily interacting with Aboriginals, in the hope of learning their language through the scientific method, are so happily naive, that you know they are not going to end well. And I like the casual rejection of the idea that a language can be learned scientifically and cut off from the culture from which it has come – as a student of foreign languages, it really appeals to me.

This book is based very closely on a real person – William Dawes, from whom Dawes Point is now named. His life, having researched thoroughly (on wiki…), is pretty artfully brought out by Grenville, giving his young fascination with science a focus that borders on autism. I liked Rooke. He was of his time, while still being progressive. I tend to think that most contemporary authors writing about times of colonialism and imperialism tend to be very heavy handed in the “look at how wrong these terrible people are” (not that I disagree at all, I might add), but honestly, if there were that many people who thought progressively about these things in the past, they wouldn’t have existed.

I said to myself I wouldn’t compare these two works, but that seems to have gone down the drain a bit. There are certain similarities, and no doubt, detractors of The Lieutenant will quote them ad infinitum. But ultimately, the two novels do very different things. The Lieutenant is a much smaller, much more intimate musing on the ideas of friendship, language and culture, and proves an ultimately diverting and enjoyable, if short, read.