The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale

For a time in history the sun never set on the British Empire and the penal colonies in Australia and Tasmania were as far away from England as one could get. The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale begins in England in 1857. Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, a rum smuggler who is experiencing financial difficulties, is forced to charter his ship to missionaries who want to go to Tasmania. Reverend Geoffrey Wilson hopes to refute Darwinism by his proving his theory that the Garden of Eden is located on Tasmania. His fellow traveler, Dr. Thomas Potter, secretly plans to collect aboriginal skulls to prove his theory of the superiority of the white race.

            

Alternating chapters begin in 1820 and move forward in time. In these chapters the suffering of the aborigine people is told by Peavay, a young mixed-race child whose tribe is eventually decimated by the English, both those who mean well and those who don’t.

As the smugglers’ ship sails toward Tasmania, the aborigines’ story moves forward to 1857. Until the ship docks in Tasmania, the reader is reading two separate and equally engrossing books, one humorous, one tragic. Once the two stories merge, the characters, humor and tragedy also merge. Reverend Wilson becomes suspicious of Dr. Potter’s motives and fights to maintain control of his project. An Eden-searching trek into the jungle drives Dr. Potter power-mad and Reverend Wilson simply mad. Peavay, renamed Cromwell by missionary teachers, agrees to guide the search.  Using Potter’s and Wilson’s own weaknesses, hubris and treachery, he manages to turn the two men against each other and abandons them in the bush. Consumed by the hatred that has been building in him for thirty-seven years, he plots his revenge.

The missionaries eventually find their way back to the ship and when the ship departs Tasmania, the party is in disarray. When Dr. Potter, consumed by a sense of power, engineers a mutiny and takes control of the ship, he brings about both disaster and one of the most satisfying story conclusions in modern literature.

Check out The English Passengers @ the library!

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride is the winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction. A historical novel set in an extremely difficult and violent period in our nation’s past, it tells the story of abolitionist John Brown and his single-handed, single-minded effort to end slavery in the United States. In the late 1850’s John Brown led a small band of armed raiders into Kansas, intent on kidnapping slaves and freeing them. The narrator of this book is Henry Shackleford, a young slave boy taken by Brown after a gun fight kills both his father and master. Because Henry is dressed in a sack, common attire for slave children, Brown believes him to be a girl and no amount of argument can dissuade him. This delusion symbolizes Brown’s fatal flaw: “He never remembered nothing but what he wanted to, and didn't tell himself nothing but what he only really wanted to believe.” Eventually Henry (Henrietta) embraces his girlhood because it keeps him out of the violence and battles Brown seeks out. For nearly four years, Henry travels with Brown and his group of abolitionists. He grows to know Brown well. He sees him clearly for who he is— a sincere, deeply religious, self-righteous, well-intentioned, dangerous man who had no doubt about his mission. He listened to the counsel of no man, only that of his God. And his God always told him what he wanted to hear. Eventually Brown abandons his raids to free slaves and plans instead to start a war for this cause. He tries to raise an army of Negroes. Blind to the fact that most of the Negroes, slave and free, have too much common sense to follow a mad man’s folly, he persists with his plan. His first move is to raid the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry to secure rifles and ammunition for his troops. This is also his last move. His delusions finally catch up with him. Out manned and outgunned, most of his “army” is killed and Brown is captured. Henry, still disguised as a girl, manages to escape and lives to tell his tale many years later. John Brown was imprisoned and hung but the fear he inspired among Southern whites is believed to have been a cause for the later secession and Civil War in the United States.  It is not easy to write a humorous book about tragedy and suffering, but James McBride manages the right ironic tone to successfully tell John Brown’s story. 

Check out The Good Lord Bird @ the library!

(Or over at the Morning News Tournament of the Books...)