Pie Palace

I’ve just finished the English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. I have to say that it’s a fantastic book. It’s told as a series of diary entries of four main characters (and a handful of supporting characters), following the parallel stories of the eradication of Tasmanian natives in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, and a voyage to find the biblical Eden by a group of narcissistic “explorers.”

The main story is that of a vicar who has formulated a theory of “divine refridgeration” to explain away troubling questions being asked by athiest geologists. The vicar has decided that the way to prove his theory is to show that the Garden of Eden was created on an island of special rock, able to withstand the creation of the earth around it. And the logical place to go looking for such an island is in newly discovered Tasmania.

However the real story seems to be the vaingloriousness of empire — as a backdrop to the exploration, we meet a Tasmanian native, whose life and culture is slowly being shredded by the encroaching British Empire. Watching as whites slowly annex the island feels almost like reading an Iain Banks novel. We can feel the pace of events gradually increasing, and we know that these seemingly harmless events are adding up in a way that the characters haven’t quite grasped, but the depth of the disaster is never quite tangible until it’s too late.

I heartily recommend this book. I’ll be returning it to the library as soon as I can, to ensure that some other lucky soul can take it out.

Despite the horrible racism displayed in the book, a number of the characters (mostly outside of the colonial hierarchy) overcome it. The epilogue contains a portion of a real letter dating from the 1850s, written by John Bradley, the tutor of a native Tasmanian boy who was sent on a whim to England to learn:

I feel much gratified in having had this boy with me, tho’ but a little time, as it confirms me more in the opinion that I have long cherished: that Man is on all parts of the globe the same; being a free agent, he may mould himself to excellence or debase himself below the brute, & that education, government and established customs are the principal causes of the distinctions amoung nations. Let us place indiscriminately all the shades of colour in the human species in the same climate, allow them the same means for development of intellect, I apprehend the blacks will keep packe with the whites, for colour neither impairs the muscles nor enervates the mind. We know that a black horse can match a white one in the race and that Hannibal and his black Africans contended gloriously with Rome for the Empire of the world. May the revolutions of mind establish the empire of reason and benevolence over the ruins of ignorance an prejudice.

I found the racism of the book, and the portrait of the time to be a little hopeless. But the ending of the story, and this quotation both offered a balm.