Tag: historical fiction

#BookReview The Settlement by Jock Serong

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The SettlementAbout the Book

On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women.

He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.

The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything about this situation proves resistant to the Commandant’s will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship…

But above all the Chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a perverse, intimate dance of violence and betrayal.

Format: ebook (320 pages) Publisher: Text Publishing
Publication date: 30th August 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Settlement is one of the books on the longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023. It’s probably not a book I would have come across had it not appeared on the list.  In the Acknowledgments section, the author refers to The Settlement as the third book in a trilogy – the previous books being (I think) Preservation and The Burning Island. As I didn’t discover this until I finished it, I can say with confidence that The Settlement can be read as a standalone.

I think we’re probably all aware of terrible injustices perpertrated on indigenous people over the centuries, particularly as a result of colonialism. (Arguably, they are still going on today.) In The Settlement the author focuses on one particularly heinous one, the true story of the forced resettlement of tribespeople from their traditional homeland in van Diemen’s Land (the colonial name for Tasmania) to Flinders Island by George Augustus Robinson.  Many of the events are drawn from Robinson’s own journal in which he recorded in meticulous detail events on the island.

Ostensibly aimed at protecting the tribespeople from murder by white settlers, the purpose of his so-called ‘Friendly Mission’ is to ‘Christianise and civilise’ them. Leaving aside the possibility that this is driven by genuine religious zeal (which actually doesn’t make it any more forgiveable) he believes success will bring him political advancement. What the book also reveals is Robinson’s involvement in frankly quite disgusting acts of desecration, purportedly in the name of science.  And the settlement turns out to be a place of disease and death for many of the tribespeople with the area of the graveyard set aside for them soon overflowing.  As one character remarks, ‘This place eats human lives’.

The only character with any redeeming features is the Storekeeper. (A clever feature of the book is that the non-indigenous characters are referred to only by the role they perform in the settlement – the Surgeon, the Commandant, the Overseer, etc – whereas the indigenous people retain their given names.) But even the Storekeeper turns a blind eye for a long while to the evil taking place.  Some of this involves the utterly vile Catechist, a violent and perverted individual who may even not be who he professes to be. The Storekeeper distracts himself with rum and by spending hours building a wall until he cannot stand by any longer.  Cleverly, the wall also acts as a metaphor for the colonialist’s desire to demonstrate proprietorship of land by creating artificial boundaries. ‘The wall, indeed all of the settlement’s fences, were lines that followed no contour in nature: in fact, they fought the contours, dividing one man’s ground from another’s, and some creatures from others. The old people, who’d lived in the other world, must have been baffled. Offended, even, since drawing lines on the land was where it all started.’

At the heart of the book is a betrayal, the breaking of a promise to Mannalargena, the leader of the tribe, that they will eventually be returned to their traditional homelands. History tells us Robinson’s enterprise ultimately resulted in failure; The Settlement graphically reveals the human cost of that failure.  However, two acts of resistance introduced into the novel stand as examples of the fight against oppression.

In three words: Uncompromising, intense, compelling

Try something similar: Mr Peacock’s Possessions by Lydia Syson

Jock SerongAbout the Author

Jock Serong’s novels have received the ARA Historical Novel Prize, the Colin Roderick Award, the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction and, internationally, the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK) and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France).  He lives with his family on Victoria’s far west coast. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

#BookReview #Ad A Complicated Matter by Anne Youngson

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A Complicated MatterAbout the Book

I used to believe the world had been created for me; every stone and grain of sand. As I grew older, I began to think of myself as something tacked on to the edge.

1939, London: From McPhail’s Passage to Kensington’s Grand Palace Hotel, Rose Dunbar is evacuated from her humble home on the Rock of Gibraltar and dropped into a chaotic city of falling bombs, perplexing class rules and bad weather. Despite being ‘flagrantly foreign’ to the locals, she becomes an efficient go-between for the upper-class ladies helping out with the war effort and her own tribe of noisy displaced families.

It is only when she is shifted to the countryside to become secretary to the plain-speaking and sightless Major Inchbold that Rose’s dizzying journey to womanhood will become more surreal than ever, as she drinks tea at the vicarage, shields her best friend from abuse and stands up for the lower orders. But Rose’s greatest dilemma is yet to come, as she must decide where her home – and her heart – really lies.

Format: eARC (368 pages)                   Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: 23rd March 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I’ve enjoyed both of Anne Youngson’s previous two books – Meet Me at the Museum and Three Women and a Boat (now titled The Narrowboat Summer) – and I was pleased to have the opportunity to exchange a few words with her and have her sign my copy of Meet Me at the Museum at Henley Literary Festival in 2018 when she appeared alongside A. J. Pearce, author of Dear Mrs. Bird.

A Complicated Matter is quite different in style and subject matter from Three Women and a Boat, as well as not being set in the present day but during and after the Second World War. However I did find echoes of Meet Me at the Museum in the parts of the book that explore feelings of isolation and finding yourself living a life different from that you’d imagined.

I admit I knew nothing about the evacuation from Gibraltar during the war of those referred to as ‘useless mouths’, i.e. those not required for the defence of the island. This evacuation – of mostly women and children – is the ‘complicated matter’ of the title. Initially, transported to Morocco, Rose and members of her family find themselves separated from loved ones and experiencing the hostility that refugees often face.  At one point there is even a plan to evacuate them to Jamaica; Rose aptly remarks ‘as if they’re a parcel’.

When they are moved to London they experience the terror of the Blitz alongside other Londoners.  But of course they’re not like other Londoners; they have been placed in an entirely alien environment. Rose’s friend Sonia, working as governess to a family, expresses the feeling of dislocation well when she writes, ‘Isn’t it hard being here instead of at home, speaking English all the time, but never feeling English? Not being able to to see the sea? Being surrounded by greenery instead of by rock. Not knowing what is going to happen to us next?’ Rose struggles to find a useful role for herself, besides caring for her disabled mother, although actually she is more useful than she gives herself credit for.

The book is structured as Rose’s story, written by herself, for the consumption of a person who is not identified until near the end of the book. Slightly confusingly this person is referred to in the third person until such time as their identity becomes clear.  The most absorbing part of the book for me was the final section in which Rose takes up a position as secretary to Major Inchbold. I thought it was clever of the author to make Major Inchbold blind as it means he can’t judge Rose on the basis of what she looks like or what she wears, but only what she says and does, how she interacts with other people. There is a moment when Rose enables Major Inchbold to sense her appearance that I found mildly erotic.  Major Inchbold’s moments of anger, borne out of frustration more than anything else, are also a neat echo of Rose’s mother’s often spiky personality.

I admired the insightful way the author explored Rose’s situation and that of anyone who finds themselves uprooted from the surroundings they have known and I found the ending rather moving.

A Complicated Matter is a gently paced novel about displacement, identity and finding your place in the world.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Doubleday via NetGalley.

In three words: Insightful, tender, absorbing

Anne YoungsonAbout the Author

Anne Youngson is the author of the Costa First Book Award-shortlisted Meet Me at the Museum; BBC Radio Book Club pick, Three Women and a Boat and the story collection, The Six Who Came to Dinner. Anne Youngson’s shrewd, warm-hearted and observational prose has been widely praised. Her new novel, A Complicated Matter explores the human heart through the coming-of-age of a young English refugee during the blitz. Anne’s work is published around the world. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and has three grandchildren. (Photo: Goodreads author page)