Christopher Columbus was looking for a passage to India when he
ran full-tilt boogie into the Americas. One of the narrators of
Matthew Kneale's ambitious historical novel English Passengers
has more modest aspirations: Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley wants
only to smuggle a little , brandy, and French pornography
from the Isle of Mann to a secluded beach in England. Yet somehow
in the process, he and his crew end up weighing anchor for
Australia. Worse, they're forced to carry three temperamental
Englishmen bound for Tasmania on a mission to discover the exact
location of the Garden of Eden. The year is 1857, and the study
of geology is beginning to make serious inroads into areas of
religious doctrine. When the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson runs across
a scientific treatise that puts the age of Silurian limestone
somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand years, he is
scandalized: "This was despite the fact that the Bible tells, and
with great clarity, that the earth was created a mere six
thousand years ago." His many attempts to prove the Bible's
accuracy lead, eventually, to a scientific expedition comprising
himself, Timothy Renshaw, a dilettante botanist, and Dr. Thomas
Potter.
Now jump back 30 years, to 1828, when a revolution of sorts is
stirring on the island of Tasmania. Over the years, white
settlers have been encroaching on aboriginal land and relations
have deteriorated into violence. At the heart of the action is
Peevay, a young half-breed abandoned by his aborigine mother, who
had been kipped and raped by a white escaped convict. Now his
vengeful mother is leading a war against the whites, and Peevay,
desperate to win her love, has joined her. Chapters from the past
narrated by Peevay and augmented by letters and dispatches from
white settlers alternate with the sections told by Kewley,
Wilson, Renshaw, and Potter. Eventually, of course, the two time
lines intersect with momentous results.
War, mutiny, shipwreck, and not a little farce make English
Passengers a gripping read, but it is Matthew Kneale's literary
ventriloquism that renders it remarkable. In a novel with so many
different points of view, the individuality of each voice stands
out. There is, for instance, the mutinous Dr. Potter, whose
descent into paranoia and egomania results in diary entries
reminiscent of a 19th-century psychotic Bridget Jones: "Manxmen =
treacherous even to v. last. Self heard Brew (lashed to mainmast
as per usual) instructing helmsman to steer N.N.W. When self
questioned he re. this he cling we = carried into Bay of
Biscay by difficult sea currents + must set course to avoid
Breton Peninsular. He pointing to distant point of land to N.N.E.
cling this = Brittany. Self = doubtful." But perhaps the most
compelling voice in English Passengers belongs to Peevay, who
paints a vivid picture of aboriginal life in a foreign tongue he
nonetheless makes his own:
When we sat so in the dark, after our eating, Tartoyen told us
stories--secret stories that I will not say even now--about the
moon and sun, and how everyone got made, from men and wallaby to
seal and kangaroo rat and so. Also he told who was in those rocks
and ains and stars, and how they went there. Until, by and
by, I could hear stories as we walked across the world, and
divine how it got so, till I knew the world as if he was some
family fellow of mine. By the close of this epic tale, the world
Peevay had known is gone forever and the lives of the Manx
sailors and English passengers have been irrevocably changed.
Based on real events in Tasmanian history, Matthew Kneale's novel
delivers a home truth about Australia's brutal colonial past,
even as it conveys the wonder and allure of the age of
exploration. --Alix Wilber