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Bookish Quotes
"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."
English Passengers
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English Passengers
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5 journalers for this copy...
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A Whitbread winner and Booker shortlistee, so I don’t need to sing the praises of this book. The ‘English Passengers’ are a country vicar and amateur geologist, a mad racist surgeon and a botanist (who’s just along for the ride!) who, in 1857, travel to Tasmania in a Manx-crewed ship to look for the site of the Garden of Eden; well at least that’s what the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson thinks they are doing. There are other agendas though, both professional and personal, that cause all sorts of distractions, diversions and farce. In the complicated way of such 'modern' books, EP also has a separate plotline, starting some 30 years earlier about the Tasmania Aborigines, particularly the half-caste 'Cromwell' Peevay, as they come into contact with the white settlers to their world. Of course the 2 (many!) stories come together in the end. What Kneale does brilliantly is juggle all sorts of aspects of history, cultural diversity & conflict and a world of ideas into a single coherent story. However, for all the obvious erudition and thorough research, the whole thing only just manages to hang together for me, maybe a case of over-egging the pudding a bit, at 450+ pages it’s quite a challenge. Thanks to bookspook and yowlyy for getting this book to me. I have an idea to send it on to satisfy a wish...if that's OK? |
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Released 7 yrs ago (5/14/2005 UTC) at WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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Thank you, thank you BookGroupMan and crazy-book-lady :^). This arrived yesterday as part of a wonderful package from Toronto (and, I see, from Woodbridge-via-Toronto!). I'm struggling through a very mediocre "Oprah's pick" at the moment (another RABCK, so I won't carry on about it too much). I've put both English Passengers and The Industry of Souls on my bedside table as a kind of inducement to soldier on with the Oprah book. (Must ... keep ... reading ...). Anyway. You are both such generous souls - thanks so much.
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I'm just starting this book, and really looking forward to it - thanks again, BookGroupMan :^). Ironically, I just finished William Golding's Rites of Passage, the story of an 1815 voyage from England to Australia by a would-be civil servant, a parson and assorted hangers-on. I'll post more here (likely by editing this journal entry) when I've finished the book. Best wishes to all.
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I'm not usually a reader of seafaring tales, and I'll confess I felt some ambivalence several weeks ago when I realized not one but two had ascended to the top of my TBR pile (see previous journal entry). So I was delighted to discover, not twenty pages into English Passengers, that while most of the early action in the book takes place on a 19th century smuggling vessel, the novel's scope, breadth and insight made that irrelevant. I really loved this book. I loved the author's evident fascination with language (how we learn it, how we use it, how it changes), and I was deeply impressed by his ability to keep a great yarn afloat despite the weighty rigging of imperialism, racism and genocide. I also found Kneale hit exactly the right humorous note in his writing (like combining Shakespearean phrases and Tasmanian gutter slang in the imagining of Peevay's vocabulary, or pointing out that most Manx aphorisms involve herring).It must be desperately difficult to find the right balance of acuity, truth, understanding and empathy in writing about 19th century Anglo-European (mis)treatment of indigenous people. It's such a grim tale and the truth (which much of English Passengers reflects) is so bloody awful. We want to distance ourselves from the mindset of the colonials who "settled" places like Tasmania (or AUS, NZ, USA, Canada, etc.), though they were ancestors to many of us. (Another BookCrosser writing a journal entry for a different copy of this book noted that her ancestors were early colonial Tasmanians, and expressed the hope that "they didn't mistreat the aborigines in this way".) We modern colonials have much to come to grips with, and a novel which captures the moral complexity of our histories in so vivid and accessible a way makes a great contribution to that enterprise. All of which is why I'll remember English Passengers as not just a great read, but a Great Book as well. You can read Salon's review of English Passengers here, and a Guardian "digested read" of the novel (spoiler alert!) here. The picture at top left is an 1866 - 1876 portrait of "Queen Truganini", until recently said to be the last living aboriginal Tasmanian (she died at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart, in 1876). A strong Aboriginal movement has grown up in Tasmania in the last twenty-five years, with over six thousand descendants proclaiming their heritage and claiming land rights. |
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