A Tasmanian Tragedy

Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) has to be called a historical novel; it is set in 1857. Now, I have a resistance to the historical novel, but this writer is one of those, along with J. G. Farrell and John Fowles, who redeem the genre for me. The book was a prize-winner when it was published in 2000 but I feel it may be undeservedly overlooked today, perhaps because Matthew Kneale is a costive writer, with only a couple of other novels appearing since. To compensate for that, English Passengers is a masterpiece, an achievement of such complexity, ingenuity and sheer narrative power that each time I reread it I am newly surprised: how can a writer have thus conjured up the wildly conflicting attitudes of another time, another place, with such persuasive force?

This is an instance of what is called the multi-voice novel – in spades. There are various voices – fifteen or more – but a small handful of crucial ones power the story. Three mid-Victorian gentlemen have chartered a ship crewed by Manxmen with the purpose of sailing to Tasmania. Two of them are obsessive to the point of mania: the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson is convinced that Tasmania is where the actual site of the Garden of Eden can be found; Dr Potter, a surgeon, has a sinister and perverted interest in racial types. The third member of the party, Timothy Renshaw, is a young botanist, propelled by his father to join the expedition in the belief that it will be a character-building experience. Then there is Illiam Quillian Kewley, captain of the Sincerity, which is in fact – unknown to those who have chartered the ship – a smuggling vessel, with a cargo of brandy and tobacco hidden aboard. And, most crucially of all, there is the voice of Peevay, a Tasmanian aboriginal boy. Peevay’s mother was abducted and raped by an escaped convict turned seal-hunter. We learn of this event from Jack Harp, the rapist, and of how the woman escaped. She becomes the leader of an aboriginal group, and for the rest of her life is fired by bitter hatred of Europeans and a mission to find and kill her rapist. Interestingly, her voice is never heard – we see her entirely through the eyes of her son, whom she despises and rejects on account of his parentage. As the story unfolds, more voices are added – those of the colonizers who are occupying the island and setting about the systematic obliteration of the way of life of its native inhabitants and, in due course, the inhabitants themselves. There are conflicting attitudes here. Many of the settlers are former convicts, who simply slaughter parties of aborigines whenever they come across them. The Governor, finding the colony more or less ungovernable, feels impelled to set the militia on native raiders in order to appease the more vocal colonists, and is seeking to move the entire surviving aboriginal population to one corner of the island, away from their traditional hunting grounds. This multi-voice technique is the perfect – perhaps the only – way in which to present this terrible apposition of inhumanity and a kind of innocence. Though it would be wrong to regard the aborigines as complete innocents: they are accustomed to pretty brisk treatment of one another in tribal warfare, and are indeed capable of the killing of settlers, of which they are accused. But they are innocent of the sophistry whereby the Governor, and indeed pretty well everyone else, can justify their eviction from their ancestral homelands simply because their presence is an inconvenience. The aborigines don’t understand, at first, what is going on. When eventually they do, it is too late. Alongside the story of Peevay and his group, there is the parallel story of the Sincerity, her crew and the maniacal Reverend Geoffrey Wilson and Dr Potter. There is wry humour here, in the plight of Captain Kewley, who had never intended to sail round the world but was simply involved in a traditional Manx smuggling operation, for which his ship had been specially kitted out, with hidden com-partments. But everything goes wrong at the outset, and he is obliged to masquerade as a charter vessel; intending to dump his charterers when that becomes expedient, he is unable to do so, and finds himself on the way to Tasmania. Throughout, voice succeeds voice. We skip from the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson’s sanctimonious version of events to Dr Potter’s pseudo-scientific ravings, from Captain Kewley’s opportunism to Peevay’s stoical but bewildered account of tribal wanderings. There are two narratives, effectively, and the skill of the storytelling is such that, in the end, the two meld into one, and the story of Peevay and his mother, with her furious intent on revenge, elides with that of the increasingly demented Victorian adventurers. Matthew Kneale includes an epilogue in which he says that the major events of the Tasmanian strand of the story are based on historical fact: the massacre of aborigines and subsequent isolation of the survivors on Flinders Island, with even the character of Peevay’s mother echoing that of a formidable aborigine woman who attempted to fight back against the settlers. Most of us, I think, have some idea of the Tasmanian saga anyway, but the reason Kneale is so persuasive as a historical novelist is that he writes without leaving the reader with any sense of the research that underlies the book; it is invisible, like the seven-eighths of an iceberg without which it would capsize. He has managed to become a ventriloquist, imbuing the narrative with all the requisite conflicting attitudes and motivations: the mindless brutality of those running the convict barracks at Port Arthur, the insensitive pieties of those seeking to indoctrinate the surviving – and dying – aborigines with Christian virtues, the bizarre lunacy of the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson in his pursuit of the Garden of Eden. A fine irony here, of course. If anywhere is the antithesis of the Garden of Eden, it is Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century, site of one of the most effective ethnic cleansings ever. The calamitous expedition into the bush to find the site, led by Peevay himself, is wonderfully described from the points of view of a group entirely at odds with one another – Wilson effectively crazy, Peevay with his own agenda – while the impervious landscape serves as a backdrop that is about as far from an Eden as it is possible to get. And then, when the reader feels that this has to be the climax, there comes the startling coda of the journey back to England, when fortunes are reversed and Captain Kewley and his crew are made captives in their own ship. The ending is unexpected, and entirely appropriate. It is the success of the multi-voice technique that, for me, overcomes my problem with the historical novel. English Passengers makes me forget that that is what I am reading. There is no authorial voice, no detached narrative, the past is made to speak for itself, to speak in many voices, and because Kneale is so skilled with a technique that would floor most writers, an almost unimaginable time and place come alive. Actually, his choice of subject is ideal: Tasmania at that point serves up such an ill-assorted populace that wildly conflicting viewpoints are inevitable. Settlers, convicts, militia, those attempting to impose order and the evasive, inscrutable aborigines are all at odds with one another in a way that makes for a perfect demonstration of what would today be called an underdeveloped society. Eventually, of course, Tasmania will become viable, but at extraordinary expense, with the most extreme victims those who never wanted to be there at all – the convicts – and those from whom it was commandeered – the aborigines. Before I end I should declare an interest. I met Matthew Kneale in Australia, back in the 1980s, at the Adelaide Literary Festival. He was in his late twenties; I had enjoyed his first novel and was glad to hear that his publishers had asked the festival organizers if he could join the British contingent since he was on a trip to Tasmania anyway. The festival had a most civilized practice of sending the long-haul writers – the Brits and the Americans – to unwind before the festival for a few days at an idyllic motel in the vineyard country outside Adelaide, and Matthew met up with us there. He blew in, every inch the hardened travelling writer, in shorts, bush hat, backpack, very evidently fresh from the bush, and putting us to shame with our jet-lag and our luggage (Marilyn French with a set of five matching cases including a hatbox). He was good company. And I now realize that he must at that time have been incubating English Passengers.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Penelope Lively 2018