The Secret River (Kate Grenville)
Historical fiction. Hmmm. On the whole, I’m, not keen. There’s something a little too loving about the way many authors treat the past, and research often weighs a book down. As it happens, I’m currently reading a book that was researched to death, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, which couldn’t be less weighed down if it tried. If that’s the standard (and it is), then Kate Grenville’s novel is not up to the mark.
Humour. Irony. Has the modern novel forgotten about its history? Novelists should be made to (re)read Fielding, Cervantes, Bulgakov, Thackeray, Rabelais and Gogol. Bulgakov wrote at the height of the Great Terror, and yet could find humour and irony. The Master and Margarita is perhaps the least serious novel of the 20th century, and yet it doesn’t suggest for a minute that the soviet regime was innocent. There is little or no humour here.
The Secret River is a very conventional novel that traces the development of William Thornhill from waterman on the Thames to the penal colony at New South Wales. The blurb tells us that Thornhill is ‘a man no better or worse than most’. Well, that sounds like a riot.
Once again there is a political undercurrent here, although it’s altogether more successfully executed than in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Here we are forced to confront the moral dilemma of the colonist: how does he treat the indigenous people? This is far from a simple matter. Convicts were, after all, forced to be there and had a right to try to survive. Clearly the aboriginals had the right to be there too.
While this is an interesting question (and one the novel stays well away from providing an answer to), it doesn’t sustain the narrative well enough. The novel is broken up into very small sections, and this renders it episodic and disjointed. Ultimately we feel for William and his family, but there’s a rather disconcerting moral emptiness at the core of the book. Perhaps this is deliberate. Is it asking us: ‘what would you do?’
