Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
You are very welcome, fantasyfan and I'm so glad (and relieved!) that people have found the book interesting to read and have largely enjoyed the experience.
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let me also join the queue of the people thanking you - coming from Italy and growing up in days when kids played in the street and go only a very basic exposure to anglophone culture, you can be sure we never studied anything to do with British colonialism, getting exposure only when I moved to the UK. My knowledge of the history of Australia is really superficial, and this book has opened up a whole new stream of more books to go on my list.
Having said that, I really did not like the first half of the book. It is not just London, I also had difficulty for the first couple of chapters in Australia too - what I found progressively less and less believable is the relationship between Thorhill and Sal - he is working in the fields all day with basically no help, she is looking after five kids while trying to fix their hut, and yet their relationship only knows unwavering support of each other, and they do find the energy at the end of the day not only for pillow talk, but for sex too. It may be that I am focussing to much on small details, but it was just too gooey for me. It was the stereotype of the good, poor man, so very good at heart, and so hard working, and such a great person.
Then came the second half, and here I really loved how the darker side of human nature came to the fore. But again, perhaps Grenville did not go far enough for my taste, in the sense that even when being obnoxious, Thornhill always have justifications that the others can are never afforded (e.g. Smasher is evil to the core) - in the final showdown after all he only explodes one shot while mayhem goes on around him. It is when she gets into the moral complexities of spiralling revenge (you pull our root-daisies out, we pick your corn, you kill some of us, we kill some of you, you poison a village, we raise an encampment to the ground...) born out of ignorance that this book really came into its own for me.
And glad to have a new member in the club, Marsi I do hope you will stay on :-)