---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14824 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Christopher Columbus was looking for a passage to India when he ran full-tilt into the Americas. One of the narrators of Matthew Kneale's ambitious historical novel English Passengers has more modest aspirations: Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley wants only to smuggle a little tobacco, brandy and French pornography from the Isle of Mann to a secluded beach in England. Yet somehow in the process he and his crew end up weighing anchor for Australia. Worse, they are forced to carry three temperamental Englishmen bound for Tasmania on a mission to discover the exact location of the Garden of Eden. The year is 1857 and the study of geology is beginning to make serious inroads into areas of religious doctrine. When the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson runs across a scientific treatise that puts the age of Silurian Limestone somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100,000 years, he is scandalised: "This was despite the fact that the Bible tells, and with great clarity, that the earth was created a mere six thousand years ago". His many attempts to prove the Bible's accuracy lead, eventually, to a scientific expedition comprised of himself, Timothy Renshaw, a dilettante botanist and Dr Thomas Potter.

Now jump back 30 years, to 1828, when a revolution of sorts is stirring on the island of Tasmania. Over the years white settlers have been encroaching on aboriginal land and relations have deteriorated into violence. At the heart of the action is Peevay, a young half-breed abandoned by his aborigine mother, who had been kidnapped and raped by a white escaped convict. Now his vengeful mother is leading a war against the whites, and Peevay, desperate to win her love, has joined her. Chapters from the past narrated by Peevay and augmented by letters and dispatches from white settlers alternate with the sections told by Kewley, Wilson, Renshaw and Potter. Eventually, of course, the two timelines intersect with momentous results.

War, mutiny, shipwreck and not a little farce make English Passengers a gripping read, but it is Matthew Kneale's literary ventriloquism that renders it remarkable. In a novel with so many different points of view, the individuality of each voice stands out. There is, for instance, the mutinous Dr Potter, whose descent into paranoia and egomania results in diary entries reminiscent of a 19th-century psychotic Bridget Jones: "Manxmen = treacherous even to v. last. Self heard Brew (lashed to mainmast as per usual) instructing helmsman to steer N.N.W. when self questioned he re. this he claiming we = carried into Bay of Biscay by difficult sea currents + must set course to avoid Breton Peninsular. He pointing to distant point of land to N.N.E. claiming this = Brittany. Self = doubtful".

Perhaps the most compelling voice in English Passengers belongs to Peevay, who paints a vivid picture of aboriginal life in a foreign tongue he nonetheless makes his own:

When we sat so in the dark, after our eating, Tartoyen told us stories--secret stories that I will not say even now--about the moon and sun, and how everyone got made, from men and wallaby to seal and kangaroo rat and so. Also he told who was in those rocks and mountains and stars, and how they went there. Until, by and by, I could hear stories as we walked across the world, and divine how it got so, till I knew the world as if he was some family fellow of mine.

By the close of this epic tale, the world Peevay knew has gone forever, and the lives of the Manx sailors and English passengers have been irrevocably changed. Based on real events in Tasmanian history, Matthew Kneale's novel delivers a home truth about Australia's brutal colonial past, even as it conveys the wonder and allure of the age of exploration. --Alix Wilber

Synopsis
This novel tells two parallel stories: one of three eccentric Englishmen who set sail for Tasmania to find the garden of Eden; the other of a young Tasmanian aborigine and his tribe, struggling against the invading British, who prove as lethal in their good intentions as in their cruelty.

---

Customer Reviews

Sad, funny, angry, enlightening, vengeful
The best book I've ever read that isn't yet a household name. Matthew Kneale demonstrates an astonishing ability to create the voices of so many disparate souls, from the deluded Reverend Wilson, the charmingly wry smuggler Kewley, the honest aboriginal Peevay, the disaffected botanist Renshaw, the criminal Harp, and the racial supremicist Potter. The characters aren't so much people as traits, affectations and attitudes and, though it tries to give everyone precisely what they deserve, it's impossible not to be shamed by the destruction wrought by ignorance. A very, very special fate is meted out upon the villain of the piece and Kneale shows that liberalism is not just bleeding hearts and wringing hands; sometimes it is cunning, witty, and carries a very vicious sting indeed.

Querky and entertaining
In many ways it is in a similar style to Bryce Courtenay's 'Potato Factory' trilogy, both in it's Tasmanian setting and in the myriad of characters involved.

I definitely recommend this book.

blundering towards the pit
A mid-nineteenth century English vicar leads an expedition to Tasmania
in the belief that he will discover the Garden of Eden. This paragon of
self-delusion is accompanied by a keen theoriser on racial differences,
on board a chartered Manx ship which, unbeknown to them, is smuggling tobacco and French brandy. Told in parallel to their tale is the lingering destruction of the aborigines of Tasmania in the preceding decades. The two stories come together in a triumph of characterisation
and almost non-stop incident.

Idealism, cynicism and the nature of racial otherness are debated without
comment in this witty and tragic book. English Passsengers is a deserved
prize-winner which I think is likely to endure. As well as being beautifully written, it shares the qualities of his father's play, Quatermass and the Pit, a fine build-up around clear, important and historically interesting themes.