English Passengers – book review

This novel, like most colonial fiction stories told in the last 25 years, looks back at history and describes why the English should feel abhorrence and shame. I found the story interesting – the premise of a group of miss-matched individuals on a voyage to Tasmania and back is a good hook for me – but there was something here I found a bit off, and I’m trying to put my finger on it. I think, to me, it seemed the author, for all he researched events and geography well, was an outsider. He wasn’t wholly present in the period or the location. Perhaps we have woken up since it was published in 2000. I hesitate to use the word ‘flippant’ but it did feel the purpose of the story was to entertain us with the terrible things those crazy colonials did back in the day rather than explore something more nuanced: how these potentially good men could be so blind, perhaps; or what these psychologies meant to the people there, on the ground. The Aboriginal part of the story is told in first person by a boy whose mother is taken, chained and raped by an Englishman and the boy is blond. I’m not sure I trust Kneale’s telling of his voice and culture; I was always aware of the English pen behind the voice as I read, and I cringed, occasionally.

‘So finally ended that mystery of what in fuck happened to Mother and Father. I saw others watching me, and their looks were as if I was different now, not quite like them, which was heinous. All of a sudden everything in all the whole world was just spoiled, and it was all my fault besides. All I wanted was to put it back like it had been just before, when we were sat around the fire, quiet and ordinary and waiting for meat.’

Peevey’s voice reminded me a little of Charlotte Randall’s brilliant Māori boy Halfie in Hokitika Town, but where Randall convinced me absolutely, Kneale’s character missed the mark.

I’m on my own here, however, as the book has been pretty universally applauded, and won the Whitbread, was shortlisted for the Booker and the Miles Franklin. The English seem to be going through a period of self-flagellation for their history (about bloody time), and this story certainly offers plenty for them to beat themselves up about.

The story has a challenging structure, with about twenty storytellers chipping in, some more consistently than others. The most likeable character is the comic Manx sea captain who constantly tries to outwit the authorities and comes very close to being hauled away in chains many times, only to escape by the skin of his teeth. There’s a little bit of the Jack Sparrow in him. It’s well contrived and a good yarn, which sits slightly uncomfortably with the terrible reality of the other characters who are arrogant, bigoted and racist to a man, and set on the methodical extermination of every aboriginal in Tasmania.

The parson is another main story-teller but he remains one-dimensional. He’s challenged by the new science of the world and gets the notion that the Garden of Eden is a real place and is located in the hills of Tasmania. He finds funding for a trip to prove this, and remains a mad zealot throughout the book, going crazier as things go wrong. He’s paired in the story with the surgeon, who, as well as his role as provocateur to the parson, reports endlessly on his theory of the order of the races, for a book he’s writing on the Destiny of Nations: ‘There is, in truth, no finer manifestation of the destiny of men than this mighty institution of imperial conquest. Here we see the stolid and fearless Saxon Type, his nature revealed as never before as he strides forth in his great quest, subduing and scattering inferior nations – the Hindoo, the American Indian, the Aboriginal race of Australia – and replacing these with his own stalwart sons.’

There is way too much of these two men, who are dull and unoriginal and don’t really develop. They just run on and on in the same overbearing manner over many chapters.

The story climaxes in the mountains of Tasmania where most of the characters come together to meet their comeuppance, and then unwinds slowly as everyone gets the end they deserve. Except the Aborigines, who, as in history, are exploited, chased off their land and either slaughtered or left to die of introduced disease. The fact that the parson in the story goes mad and is left ranting on the streets doesn’t give any balance to the ending.

So yes, partly a good story and a clever book but it has become fairly obvious why I didn’t like it. As colonial fiction, it has seriously dated. If you’re telling the story of the deliberate extermination of a race of people in a matter of decades, that’s your story. That story doesn’t belong as a sub-plot in a lively tale of those quirky colonials.