The Secret River
Kate Grenville Canongate, 334pp, £12.99
ISBN 1841956821
William Thornhill knows "how a man might fall in love with a piece of ground", how he might be driven to steal, lie and kill to own that ground beneath his feet. A petty criminal transported from England to Australia, Thornhill is the displaced protagonist of this powerful novel, which grapples with the maltreatment of aboriginal people by the white settlers in Australia in the 19th century. Grenville's first novel, The Idea of Perfection, won the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction. Here, she exposes the imperfections of recorded history.
Though we are offered no glimpse in- to the psyche of the Aboriginals, we are dragged deep into the troubled mind of Thornhill, a hero at once repellent and sympathetic. He is born into a dark, cold, cramped Victorian London, a world in which "there was never enough". He is always hungry. His rage at being poor and powerless is palpable. He is accused of theft and, accompanied by his long- suffering wife Sal, is transported to Australia, an alien landscape of heat, light, cliffs and a vast, unpredictable sky. Grenville conjures this in lush, sensuous prose - it is "a half-formed temporary sort of place", "a place out of a dream", dangerous yet alluring. A place to die for.
In Australia, Thornhill and his wife can afford to eat meat three times a week, drink Madeira, and yet it is here that Thornhill is stricken by another kind of want: "the piercing hunger in his guts: to own . . . to say mine". He yearns to shape his own destiny, to wipe the slate clean and stamp his name upon it in a plot of lush riverside land he calls "Thornhill's Point". But the land is already inhabited by aboriginal people, to whom the very concept of ownership is alien. This tug- of-war generates horrific violence.
As Thornhill does battle with the Aboriginals, he becomes troubled by the strangeness in himself that makes him turn a blind eye to a dying boy. The more he struggles to possess land, the more he becomes psychologically dispossessed - how could he, a good man, come to murder people? "William Thornhills will fill up the whole world," he once vowed, on being taunted for having a name "common as dirt". But in this humane, penetrating study of dislocation, he isn't even sure who William Thornhill is.
How our environment shapes us is a pervasive theme: "It seemed that he had become another man altogether. Eating the food of this country, drinking its water, breathing its air, had remade him, particle by particle." But there is also, in Thornhill, a lingering spiritual hunger, a longing to belong in "a place that was part of his flesh and spirit". As his tale shows, a person's fear of losing what he loves most - be it a person or a piece of land - may be so overwhelming that, in a flawed attempt to preserve his place in the world, he ends up destroying it.
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