The Secret River [Paperback]

Australian writers seem to have strong ties to the histories of their own forebears. Thomas Keneally, Richard Flanagan and Roger McDonald are but a few authors who have successfully re-painted history on a fictional canvas. Kate Grenville - who in "Joan Makes History" tried to encapsulate all of [European] Australia's history through one imaginary woman - has narrowed her focus with this book. This account of William Thornhill, transplanted Thames River waterman, depicts the kind of person capable of founding a nation. With excellent insight into a man's ambitions, feelings and needs, Grenville chains the reader's interest from the opening pages. Release comes only at the final page, and while satisfying, leaves one seriously disturbed by the cost of "nation building".

Grenville's story isn't new. Thousands of people were "transported" to Australia after 1788, some escaping the gallows, while the rest relieved the intense pressure of British gaols. Thornhill was lucky in his wife Sal's appeal to escort William being successfully considered. There were few women in Port Jackson, and a wife brought stability. Grenville offers a fine touch of irony in William's being "assigned" to Sal as a "working convict". Again, as he had in London, William becomes a waterman - helping a boat owner ferry cargo up and down the Hawkesbury River. While conveying along the river, Thornhill spots a point of land amenable to homesteading.

Thornhill and Sal begin scrabbling a home in the bush, but immediately confront a major obstacle. The key issue in "founding" the nation of Australia is that it was already occupied. Although the British Privy Council would declare an entire continent "terra nullus" - unoccupied land - , the Aborigines, who had lived there for thousands of years, knew otherwise. Grenville grants Thornhill more humanity than most of his neighbours. Some of that is due to Thornhill's wife, Sal, but the former Londoner isn't a fixed mentality. He's adaptable and enterprising without avarice. Grenville's description of Thornhill's initial and later dealings with the Aborigines, and the many confrontations that occurred as other settlers moved in, forms the centrepiece of her narrative. Europeans were astonished at how easily the Aborigines moved in the forest. Silent, evasive, intimately knowledgeable about the land, the Aborigines were vulnerable only to bullets - and something else the British had available.

While Thornhill wants peaceful coexistence, circumstances force other conditions. Others, of course, are less tolerating and the history of British settlers slaughtering those non-existent Aborigines might have started at Thornhill's Point. The British population, both free and under sentence, is growing. Farming and pasturage put pressures on land unable to support two vastly different lifestyles. The skirmishing diminishes Sal's relationship with her husband. Fearful for their children and herself, she threatens to take them to a settlement for safety. As pressures mount, the interaction of husband and wife grows quietly intense. Grenville portrays the conflicting loyalties - husband and wife, Thornhill and his land, the couple and their neighbours, humanity offsetting avarice - with clarity and feeling. You are kept spellbound as the story takes you to the resolution of this web of emotion.

NOTE: "The Secret River" is the fictional tale of Kate Grenville's own transported London ancestor. Those wishing to understand how history influences a writer's choices are directed to Grenville's "Searching for The Secret River for the effort that went in to making this novel. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

It is not easy for an author to turn an important page of a nation's history, and create a compelling story out of it. But then, Kate Grenville is not your average writer. All the talents that won her the Orange Prize are displayed with unforgiving clarity in her latest offering...

Based partly, if not more, on a true story tied to Grenville's own ancestral roots, the novel centres around William Thornhill who is born into a big suburban family in London struggling to come to terms with their poverty. He becomes a waterman on River Thames, and weds his sweetheart Sal. He succumbs, however, to a grave weakness, and is condemned to a terrible fate - a life sentence in the then newly discovered English colony for the damned, Australia.

The story is then one of struggle - a perennial one between the foreigners who conquer a native land, and the natives who fight back. There are no winners in this game. Only losers. The natives, who lose their right to an existence, and the white settlers who lose their own sense of morality and righteousness.

Grenville spares no one in exposing the colonial era for what it was, and what it represented - the shabby minds that represented the gentry and the aristocracy in London, and the force of corruption that weighs down heavily on the ordinary and the wise to sheer brutality and arrogance.

The tale is poignant, and at times, overwhelmingly sad. Grenville's prose is simple, yet gripping and uncompromising. The characters linger on in the reader's mind long after he or she finishes the novel - particularly, Sal - and this does the story immense credit. Her descriptive powers are at once evocative, and truly picturesque. The reader is transported into a unique world from which escape, at times desirable, is painfully impossible.

As Patrick White said, "it is a pleasure to be able to praise a true novelist."

This was a compelling read - one family's struggle against a world which they did not control. Having said that, I have to confess a personal weakness for the histroical epic as a genre.

The central characters feel well well developed, although perhaps more could have been made of the wayward son. But that is minor. The imagery is stunning; the detail beautiful. The plot is gripping, leading to a real page turner - even though the eventual outcome (successful colonization of Australia at the expense of the native population) is well known. I was on tenterhooks to see where Thornhill would end up in the grand history of Australia.

The key theme for me was the rollercoaster ride between empowerment and powerlessness. Thornhill, the petty villain, was willing and eager to better himself - first by training as a boatman and marrying above his station, then as a trader in the new territories, and then as a farmer/landowner. But against this ambition, there were circumstances which he couldn't control. Illness and debt of his in-laws; the fate of the courts when caught pilfering; the elements; and the native Australians.

Thornhill and his homesick wife Sal were so eager to do the right thing, but the tragedy was that circumstances could not permit them, simultaneously, to do the right thing by each other and also by human justice. Powerlessness meant Thornhill had to choose between his conscience and his livelihood - in London, in Sydney and by the banks of the Hawkesbury. Meanwhile, others made their own choices and reaped the various consequences.

The novel sets the hope of the settlers and the tragedy of the native population against one another to perfection. It would have been easy to take a moralistic stance, but Ms Grenville does not. She leaves it for the reader to draw their own conclusions. The natives were [probably] not a peaceable population who were willing to be embraced - the settlers were not [all] bloodthirsty brutes.

This lack of black and white simplicity means I still can't work out in my own mind whether Thornhill ultimately called it right or wrong. And it is Ms Grenville's achievement that I care.

I was also touched with sadness as Sal's dream of a return to London began to diminish - particularly because it never seemed to be replaced with a love of her new home.

This is a grand and multifaceted novel - it takes big themes but has the humanity of the family level. This novel has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. It would be a worthy winner.