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There is much that is good about Kate Grenville’s novel, but what impressed me most is her ability to get so deeply inside a character that she can show what the world looks like through his eyes. (Forgive the “he��: Grenville’s central character in this novel is a man.) Here is William Thornhill, Thames River lighterman:

After a time the mud-choked water and the ships it carried, thick on its back like fleas on a dog, became nothing more than a big room of which every corner was known. He came to love that wide pale light around him out on the river, the falling away of insignificant things in the face of the great radiance of the sky. He would rest on the oars at Hungerford Reach, where the tide could be relied on to sweep him around, and stare along the water at the way the light wrapped itself around every object. (p.34)

Here he is in 1806, transported to the colony of New South Wales “during the term of his Natural Life�� (p.74), bewildered by the strangeness of the environment:

Instead of dropping their leaves [eucalyptus trees] cast off their bark so it dangled among the branches like dirty rags. In every direction that the eye travelled from the settlement all it could see were the immense bulges and distances of that grey-green forest. There was something about its tangle that seemed to make the eye blind, searching for pattern and finding none. It was exhausting to look at: different everywhere and yet everywhere the same. (p.91)

And here is Grenville’s description of how Thornhill perceived the Aboriginal people of Australia:

There were no signs that the blacks felt the place belonged to them. They had no fences that said, this is mine. No house that said, this is our home. There were no fields or flocks that said, we have put the labour of our hands into this place. (p.96)

The minute we read this we see his terrible error.

Once Thornhill is freed and moves with his family to a piece of land up the Hawkesbury River to grow corn and raise hogs, the stage is set for a confrontation that we know will be violent. At this point I found the tension unbearable and—so as to be able to sleep at night--had to put the book down and read something else (Robert Dessaix’s wonderful A Mother's Disgrace).

We all know that white settlers in Australia committed atrocities of all sorts as they wrested the land from its Aboriginal inhabitants; Grenville successfully uses fiction to show why that happened: how people who arrived with nothing were corrupted by the possibility the colony offered to have something.

Grenville’s novel offers much more than this, of course: I can’t recommend it highly enough.