Adam Mazmanian
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (Penguin)
The genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines is so little remarked upon probably because it was so successful. Between the arrival of European settlers in 1804 and the end of a brief Aboriginal uprising in 1830, Tasmania’s native population was exterminated, with but a few sad exceptions. A photograph dated 1858 depicts four of the last indigenous Tasmanians foppishly outfitted in the Sunday best of a bourgeois Victorian. The photo is unevenly exposed and a bit worse for the years, but the still, deepset eyes and flat, expressionless lips bespeak a hatred as vast and consuming as any that could be provoked by the evils of man.
An honestly crafted historical novel can’t right the wrongs of history or turn back the time to rescue the innocent and punish the guilty. But that doesn’t mean that a writer can’t unload with both barrels on the brutish, pompous, cartoonishly malevolent avatars of 19thcentury imperialism. English novelist Matthew Kneale does all that and more in this Whitbread Prizewinning (and Bookershortlisted) novel, now in paperback.
He sends up the biblical literalism of Darwin’s critics, skewering the racial theorists who used Darwin to confirm their own prejudices. He mercilessly lampoons the penalcolonial complex that laid waste to Tasmania’s 40 000 years of continuous human habitation in just short of 30 years. This is done with a droll, ironical flourish that belies a stern, moral critique.
That said, meet the clever, goodnatured Illiam Quillian Kewley, a luckless Manxman who risks his entire fortune on a specially outfitted smuggling ship, the Sincerity. This being 1857, and duties on tobacco and liquor imported into England being what they are, Kewley decides that the risk involved in sailing from the tiny (and dutyfree) Isle of Man would set him and his wife up in high style.
Meanwhile, Yorkshire vicar Geoffrey Wilson is plotting a trip of his own. Driven to distraction by Darwin, Wilson obsessively struggles to reconcile fossil evidence with his conviction that God created the world 4 000 years before the birth of Jesus. His answer to the evolutionists? The process of ”Divine Refrigeration”. Equally logical to Wilson is the true location of the Garden of Eden: Tasmania.
Kneale gives fullthroated roar to his characters, shifting firstperson narration among five major characters and many more minor ones. Among them is Peevay, a Tasmanian who greets the first English settlers with shy optimism but gradually learns to despise the interlopers.
The story shifts between Kewley’s 1857 voyage (in which he links up with Wilson) and the early days of the English settlement of Tasmania and the incipient Aboriginal rebellion of the 1820s. The Aboriginal rebellion is as tragic as life aboard the Sincerity is hilarious. There’s no mistaking where Kneale stands. The English are characterised by their arrogance and their stupidity, whereas the worst trait attached to the dispossessed native Tasmanians is either righteous anger or a sad streak of gullibility.
Novelists bent on delivering a message too often paper over the fundamentals of storytelling. To his credit, Kneale spins a yarn as entertaining as any Flashman novel while revisiting one of the darker chapters of human history.