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4.0 out of 5 stars
Great introduction to early Australian history., Nov 17 2008
The Lieutenant When I was in Australia recently, I asked a friend, who had first introduced me to Tim Winton's novels twelve years ago, to recommend another Australian writer whose work I should read. She told me to look for books by Kate Grenville. Later in Sydney, my aunt wanted to buy me an Australian book as a gift, and I found The Lieutenant, Grenville's most recent book on the shelves in a department store. I feel that I read this novel under the best circumstances because I was in New South Wales the whole time that I was reading it, and I had already been to Circular Quay in Sydney where the First Fleet landed. I could better imagine the world that this first group of sailors, marines and prisoners came to, even though the place of their landing is now a busy urban transit site.
The lieutenant of the title is Daniel Rooke, a character more interested in astronomy than the duties involved in dealing with prisoners and adapting to a new world and the aboriginal inhabitants. Because of the isolated location of his observatory, he is able to make more advances in learning the language of the native people than the sailors and new Australian governor in the main settlement. However, he is unable to control the effects of contact between the aboringinals and the new settlers.
I enjoyed this novel and learned a great deal about early Australian colonisation at the same time. I now plan to read Grenville's earlier award-winning novel, The Secret River, which tells the story of prisoners transported to Australia who eventually make a life for themselves in their new land. This is the story of Grenville's own ancestors.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
"To warm one's hands by the fire and then..., Sep 12 2009
... to squeeze gently the fingers of another person." This is a long winded explanation for the word "kamara", the Cadigal expression for something like 'my friend'. The Cadigal are one of Australia's aboriginal 'tribes' who Daniel Rooke, astronomer by passion and soldier by necessity, encounters after landing in New South Wales with the First Fleet in 1788. Rooke, a loner since childhood, highly intelligent and curious about science, but awkward in his dealings with people, is an unlikely hero for an engaging gentle story of first intercultural encounters with aboriginals as the new British administration struggles to establish the first settlement in Sydney Cove. In her typical gentle and sensitive writing Kate Grenville has achieved something admirable and exciting with this novel: by recreating a fictionalized version of the actual events of the time, she has shown how human beings can succeed in interacting across any language and cultural divide and as a result can develop friendships that will change them fundamentally.
Daniel Rooke, similar to William Thornhill in The Secret River, her 2005 award winning novel, is loosely based on a real person: William Dawes, a little known soldier with an keen interest in the stars, the strange natural beauty of the local environment and, last but not least, a talent for languages. He inspired and informed Grenville's fictional treatment of a subject matter that has not lost its importance for Australians since. Beyond the specifics of historical events, Grenville has imagined a beautifully rendered intimate account of "first contact" between two very distinct cultures realized by two unusual individuals, Rooke and a young aboriginal girl, Tagaran. In fact, Grenville came across Dawes' notebooks by chance while researching her earlier book. Whereas in SECRET RIVER the aboriginals are, while strongly in evidence, without a direct voice (because she refused to invent one for them), here Grenville has Dawes notes that describe his growing friendship with a group of Cadigals, and in particular Patyegarang, the model for the fictional Tagaran, and their, often playful, attempts at learning each others language. The fictional story is created around the unique direct dialog and Dawes/Rooke's reflections on language and meaning, clearly set off in the text by italic print.
Grenville evokes the calm that comes over the isolated outpost that Rooke has created for himself - a different world that makes him - and the reader - forget the reality of the early encounters between military and locals and the precarious situation the settlement finds itself in. Upon arrival Rooke had established a very basic observatory on a promontory close to, yet separated from, the new settlement at Syndey Cove. He had grown increasingly fond of this, his private space, "[a] place so strange [it] took a layer of skin off a man and left him peeled... where the solitude without matched the solitude within." Yet, it is also the starting point for a journey of discovery of his other inner self that will bring him both deep happiness and an existential, and unavoidable, moral dilemma.
Grenville does not ignore the "other world" beyond Rooke's hut and space: the tentative efforts by the Governor to establish communication with the locals, the military operations against prisoners and aboriginals, etc. She develops believable characters around Rooke, in particular Captain Talbot Silk, a friend of Rooke's from an earlier navy expedition. Based on the historical Watkin Tench, he is quite the opposite in character to Rooke: smooth talking, jovial and with a contract for a book chronicling their early experiences in the settlement. Events are not going well and, in the end, like Dawes himself, Rooke is confronted with a moral choice and his decision will decide his life's path from then on.
For me Grenville's novel came dramatically alive in the encounters between Rooke and the aboriginal group. The importance of that section carries through to the end. Anybody who has ever been an outsider within a completely foreign culture will relate to the hero's experience: the first efforts at communication, the misunderstandings, the children's whispering and repeating of words and phrases, reflecting their complete lack of experience with a person not familiar with their language, their gestures and customs. Grenville captures this combination of awe and elation on both sides magnificently. [Friederike Knabe]
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4.0 out of 5 stars
"For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face", Sep 11 2009
It's impossible to imagine how the Aboriginal people of Australia felt when they first saw the rag-tag ships of the First Fleet, the Sirius skewed to port and lumbering up Sydney Harbor in January of 1788. Certainly the British settlers, composed of a mix of soldiers and convicts where similarly blindsided by their own assumptions if this new world, their myopic view of the natives and their place in the new British Empire often clashing with the reality of this new world they had come to. Told from the point of view of the intelligent and sensitive Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, Grenville's novel speaks to his concerns and his particular needs as his journey begins as a boy in Portsmouth where he's offered a bursary, a place at the Portsmouth Navel Academy, far from his attic in Church Street. A penchant for astronomy, the logic of notation and the movements of the heavenly bodies, Daniel dreams of leaving the place, not just the Academy but Portsmouth, but those narrow streets where everyone knows him so well.
Daniel had thought to find a niche where he could make a life, first battling the French in Chesapeake Harbor, and then jumping at the opportunity to work as an astronomer in the proposed expedition to NSW, ostensibly to see Halley's comet. But Daniel is convinced that NSW is but "a smooth page waiting to be written on." Blessed with an intelligence and this prospect offered him a chance to use it, Daniel is fully aware that under the benign surface of life in His Majesty's service with its rituals and its uniforms and pleasantries, was horror.
As the settlers form their colony, the redcoats and the convicts in this "hard empty light and breathless heat" Grenville beautifully underplays the ramshackle encampment, the distant clunk of axes and the occasional shout while the native men watch the intruders as still as rocks. The Rooke and his colleague seek to evade the more unsavory duties of their profession is not the only imperative, but NSW promises other riches. A makeshift observatory on a promontory by the cove would be part of the settlement, but not in it. "Present, but not forgotten" Astronomy for Rooke provides a convenient screen for a self that he did not choose to share with any of the other souls marooned with him.
Isolated in his observatory and his make-shift hut, the young aboriginal girl, Tagaran comes to him and the first understandings of their language - perhaps ten or twelve years old, with a long graceful neck and an explosive mobile face, her lips moving around streams of words. Rooke forms a notebook with their words, vocabulary and grammatical forms, "like the jaws of some indigenous machine" and realizes that everything in his life had been leading here, he sees it as clearly as a map, his destiny where language is a machine, each part understood in relation to other parts. The visits of Tagaran and her friends, and the development of the notebooks only reinforce Rooke's sense of having been offered a gift is a boundary being crossed and erased, "like ink in water, one language melting into another."
It is these small intricate details which infuse The Lieutenant with an emotional intensity along with Grenville's powerful descriptions of a virgin land. As Rooke steadily reveals intimate thoughts and secret dreams, all clinging desperately for purchase in a drastic new world, the author describes the bushes of lush foliage, "gnarled pink monsters twisted arthritic fingers into the sky" the squat white trees padded with bark. The red parrots sidled along branches, chattering and whistling. A number of set pieces accelerate the action, especially the decision to explore inland with the intention of establishing a second settlement, and the discovery of Rose Hill, where the soil was fertile only by comparison with the grey sand of Sydney Cove, and the agriculture which hopefully will feed the infant colony; and a terrible torture scene as a prisoner is flogged with the cat-o-nine tales after stealing potatoes. And later, and expedition to Botany Bay and the order to shoot six natives as retribution for acts of violence against the settlers. Eventually, the natives, beaten down by incessant violence of the colonists, seem unable or unwilling to open their hearts to any form of reconciliation, a condition further exacerbated by the British beliefs of superiority. Throughout, the focus is always on Rooke's dilemma as he constantly reminds himself that he's not a man of science "an astronomer of the fairest promise" but just another of the governor's subjects. The wheels keep turning in the machine that would let him obey while keeping his hands clean. Rooke is all too aware of the dangerous ambiguity that the presence of a thousand of His Majesty's subjects causes in such a pristine and unsullied place. Mike Leonard September 09.
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