It's been an extra busy month, and I finally have been able to finish this book. In fact I admit to alternating between the ebook and audiobook (thank you Amazon Whispersync!). It was a fantastic narration, and I found it added even more emotion and power to the scenes.
First, I want to thank Bookpossum for the fantastic nominations and leading this discussion. I also have appreciated the insights and experiences shared by our Australian friends to help us better understand the culture and history of their country. This book is the third that I have read this year about Australia, and I very much hope to visit there someday. I have added several of the nominations to my TBR list as well.
I thought the last part of the book set in the future was a bit too over-done, although I liked the direction that it took. William Thornhill finds wealth and a higher place in society, but he is never rested or satisfied. Nothing seems to go perfect either: the architectural harmony of the house is off-balance, Sal's garden and the poplars don't thrive, his son Dick ignores him, the hired portrait hidden away, always watching from the bench every evening, etc.
In September I read
Ramona, an American 19th century classic by Helen Hunt Jackson. It tells the story of southern California after the Mexican-American war and deals with the racial conflicts of the Americans, Mexicans, Spanish and Native Indian tribes as Americans flood into the new state and take over the land as their own. It, however, is primarily told from the perspectives of the Native Americans who are displaced and killed as well as the Mexicans and Spanish who also lose their land. I had that recent reading in the back of my mind as a comparison as I read the
Secret River told from the perspective of the settlers.
There were some beautifully written passages, and I took lots of highlights. These particular ones resonated with me at the turning point of the book when they disperse the natives.
Quote:
He knew all of these men, had laughed with them over a drink, haggled with them for their wheat and pumpkins. By and large he had never considered them to be bad men. And yet their lives, like his, had somehow brought them to this: waiting for the tide to turn, so they could go and do what only the worst of men would do. (location 4014)
How had his life funnelled down to this corner, in which he had so little choice? His life had funnelled down once before, in Newgate, into the dead-end of the condemned cell. But the thing that lay ahead of him there had been out of his hands. There was a kind of innocence in waiting for Mr Executioner. The difference with this was that he was choosing it, of his own free will. (location 4024)
The noose would have ended his life, but what he was about to do would end it too. Whichever choice he made, his life would not go on as it had before. The William Thornhill who had woken up that morning would not be the same William Thornhill who went to bed tomorrow night. (location 4027)
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Kate Grenville has a website which has posted some of her interviews.
http://kategrenville.com/node/71
Here is a quote from one of the interviews that I found interesting to understand what she hoped for readers to gain from her book.
Quote:
There seemed no point in writing a book about a monster, an unequivocally bad man. That would let us off the hook. Oh, we could smugly say, I'm not like that, I'd never do that. Then we turn away and there's been no enlargement of understanding.
But the reason for writing the book was to delve into exactly that tricky area: us: that is, white Australians like me, who've benefited from what our ancestors did. Where can we stand, morally?
Exploring that question takes us far beyond easy labels. It takes us into understanding why a man like Thornhill might do what he does. That's a complicated knot of many threads: his own past, his feeling for right and wrong, pressure from the culture around him, love for his family, self-interest.... In the end, I felt he was a man neither better nor worse than most, but had been acted on by all those factors to do somethiong that was deeply wrong and which, in his heart, he knew to be deeply wrong.
It also takes us right into the present, back to us, where there's no simple way to accommodate the wrongs that our ancestors did. The more I explored this troubling subject, the less sure I was of any simple answers. One thing I could see, though, was a moral imperative to try to tell the story of what had happened on the frontier - to tell it as truthfully as I could ( within the necessary shapings of fiction) and to tell it as fully as I could ( not leaving out the parts we flinch from). Acknowledgement seemed a necessary first step, without which nothing better was likely to happen.
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