I really enjoyed the book. I found it to have many contrasts and comparisons with Heart of Darkness.
For most of the book, I wasn't so pleased with most of the characterisations. I felt that the author was battling with herself, wanting to create nuanced and realistic characters while often slipping into stereotypes, generalisations and a modern sensibility, from the good Blackwood to the bad Smasher, from the noble savages to the Thornhills who were always given a reason to explain away any bad they did.
However with the end of the book my perception of the characterisations changed. I had thought the likely outcome of the book was to be a crisis for Thornhill where he learnt from his mistakes and took the moral high road, and so I was taken off guard when the crisis occurred and he instead gave into immorality and decided to go to the massacre. He was still given the relative out of barely participating, but I think his choice to go at all and participate no matter how little was his irreversible breaking bad moment.
Perhaps for Grenville there was a mistake in choosing for her protagonist someone so closely resembling someone in her own family tree, where it can be viewed as her trying to explain away things her descendants may have done, a sort of fantasy of her descendants being otherwise good and upright people almost forced into doing certain bad things by circumstance, and this was as true of the Thornhills time in England as of their time in Australia.
Regardless, she had Thornhill participate in the massacre, and prosper from it. Whether she meant it or not, once that happened the modern sensibility she may have given Thornhill before didn't matter to me as much, and in fact I could even view it as a building up of a man with a morality that we could somewhat relate to, only to then subvert expectations with him choosing to do something truly terrible. The ending shed a different light on the rest of the book because Grenville didn’t imbue Thornhill with a sense of morality to have him overcome the immorality of what was going on in Australia at the time, but rather to give in to it, no matter how unwillingly. And so, despite some simpleness at times, to me this book becomes a more complex meditation on morality and its vagaries in difficult situations.
I had quite a fun time looking around on Google maps at the river (the map in the beginning of the book was too hard to see, as is general for ebook maps unfortunately). Before I knew just how closely locations followed real locations, I was trying to guess just which point might be Thornhill's if it were a real point, and I'm happy to say I guessed correctly!

I had no idea at the time that Thornhill was so closely based on Wiseman, only that the story was loosely based on ancestors of Grenville's, and so I just wasn't quite sure if she would've had Thornhill settle on a point that today is a small town with a ferry, but the point just looked so close to the description, and little did I know that the real Thornhill was the one who basically settled and started the town! I had even looked up the river near it trying to decide where Blackwood's place might have been (and saw many lagoons to choose from).
I see now that Bookpossum provided some very interesting pictures of the point earlier in the thread, and I'd like to add a few pictures. These are of the house built at the end of the story by Thornhill, which was actually a real house built by Wiseman. it's now an inn and pub:
Whenever I finally go to Australia, I'm tempted to take an overnight trip out of Sydney to stay there one night.
There are two places I do have a hard time locating on the map compared to the book - Smasher’s place and the “secret river” where Thornhill finds the poisoned Aborigines. From the way they were written they seem to both be specific places, and I see on the map some possibilities but nothing that seems obviously correct.
I thought it interesting how at the end of the book, Grenville resolved the differences in Thornhill’s story with her own ancestor Wiseman by having Thornhill “steal” a better history from another man that is very similar to Wiseman’s biography. I do wonder though at the reason given for the other man not minding. She writes that, “Loveday had found a new story, too, involving a young girl, a cruel father and a false accusation. He was not going to ask for his old one back.” Were we supposed to understand what this meant?
As for the writing, I enjoyed how perceptive Grenville was of the smaller things in life. Such as
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Thornhill saw for the first time how much she missed having people around her. It was a little death, not being able to make a tale out of the small moments of life and share them with someone for whom they were new.
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But none of the women so much as glanced at her, although it was evident from some slight alteration in the way they held themselves that they had heard.
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There was a daintiness of thinking to Smasher, Thornhill realised, that would have been better employed if his life had been different.
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And I’ll finish by saying I often liked her prose as well, such as
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Whatever the shadow was that lived with them, it did not belong just to him, but to her as well: it was a space they both inhabited. But it seemed there was no way to speak into that silent place. Their lives had slowly grown around it, the way the roots of a river-fig grew around a rock.
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