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Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes
I wasn't that enthralled with the first forty pages, but once I got to the trial. Part way into the third section and I'm totally sucked in.
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My reaction to the book as a whole and its powerful story was negatively influenced by the part set in London, which I thought was terrible. It was hackneyed in story, overwritten in style and had a modern sensibility overlaying what was supposed to be William's response to the world around him. Just as an example, the boy William, a product of the late 18th century, would not have registered people's smelly bodies nor tankards that were dirty. Grenville unfortunately seemed to think she had to clobber us over the head, again and again and yet again, with the grim poverty of London's lower classes, where I, at any rate, would have preferred to take that as a given, unless she had been able to make a better job of it.
Fortunately, her prose style was more suited to describing the glories of the Australian landscape than it was to evoking the infrastructure of London two centuries ago and the book vastly improved with the change of setting. I did not like her tic of using italics rather than quotes. I infer that it was to demonstrate the essential inarticulateness of the protagonist and his wife, but it drew attention to itself, again, as if she didn't trust her story enough to show itself. Ultimately, Grenville's not a good enough writer to take liberties with standard punctuation.
I wanted to get the negatives mostly out of the way, because the rest was riveting, both in setting and in the tale of those at the bottom who end up scrapping with each other, rather than with those in power who are the cause of their miseries. Thornhill was an excellent realization of the warring elements of oppressed and oppressor within one person and Blackwood as a man of empathy. The rest of the characters tended toward the single note, but the men were effective at illustrating the inherent evil in the whole resettlement scheme; I just wish Grenville had done a better job breathing life into noble wife Sal. It also makes me a little uncomfortable that the Aboriginal people were presented as uniformly content, living harmoniously with each other and the land. I know deep character analysis of any of the blacks would have been outside the scope and point of the book, but I find that tendency (which we see in the US, too, in some modern-day depictions of Indians) to be unintentionally racist.
Grenville triumphs in making Thornhill simultaneously sympathetic and unsympathetic and thus lays the case for all the settler nations. I think this is an important novel and I'm very glad to have read it. I give her full marks for concept and setting and imagery and her main character; her execution of the story didn't quite do them justice.