The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kate GrenvilleEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-04-10
ISBN: 1841959146
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Book Reviews of The Secret River
Book Review: "It seemed that he had become another person altogether..."
Summary: 5 Stars
This review is dedicated to the late Stephen Haines, also known as "The Bunyip", who kindled more interest in me for early Australian history than he ever knew. He also urged me to read THE SECRET RIVER. Unusual for him, he highlighted one short paragraph only in our copy. In a way, though, it sums up the aspiration and dilemma for the central character, William Thrornhill, and many of the early European settlers in Australia: "...It was a piercing hunger in his guts: to own it. To say MINE, in a way he had never been able to say MINE of anything at all" (p.106). Through exploring the life of this one person, Kate Grenville probes fundamental issues of social and cultural identity, ethnic conflict and personal morality. With a confident, yet surprisingly gentle and subtle voice, the author has presented us with an extraordinary novel, rich with historical detail, evocative in its description of the natural landscape, and stirring in its examination of the depth of human emotions, whether love or hate, tolerance or greed.
The novel, inspired and loosely based on the author's own ancestor, follows young William Thornhill from his family's desolately poor circumstances in London in the late seventeen eighties to Australia where he, as a deported felon, is given a second chance to build a better existence for himself and his beloved Sal, his childhood sweetheart, wife and centre of his emotional life.
William is a big, simple fellow, illiterate, a "waterman", used to ferrying people and goods from one side of the Thames to the other. Once arrived in Sydney in 1806, and released into the custody of his wife, he takes up his trade again while Sal manages the household, an increasing number of children as well as some lucrative business on the side. After joining Thomas Blackwood, a former acquaintance, on his trade ship, supplying a scattered group of settlers along the Hawkesbury river and bringing their goods back to the city, William discovers and nurtures a new ambition: owning a piece of land and settle into future comfort with his family. Grenville sensitively captures the deep emotions awakening with his plan while at the same time, and subtly, hinting to the reader at his naivety and the complexity of any such endeavour.
The primary impediment to his and other settlers' ambition is that the land around the small farm holdings is not "empty" of inhabitants, i.e. a "terra nullius", despite the official British definition of the colony at the time. The countryside around Sydney and elsewhere across the land had been lived in by aboriginal peoples for the longest time, their philosophy and lifestyle so different that is was bound to result in conflict with the Europeans. Grenville portrays every possible kind of likely encounter between settlers and Aboriginals: from quietly tolerating each other with or without efforts to communicate and trade to the different levels of conflict and violent action and counter action in the attempt to rid the land of the "blacks", accompanied by any name calling imaginable. In the bars in Sydney and at social gatherings among the neighbouring settlers - all "emancipists", meaning former convicts - the fisherman's yarn usually centres around the most recent attack by blacks, or new ideas how to chase them away or worse.
Thanks to his wife's strong sense of morality and her important influence over his own understanding of reality, William, in due course the proud occupant of one piece of land along the river, is increasingly torn between the promise he made to her not to engage in violence, but rather to "give a little - take a little" when dealing with his aboriginal neighbours, and the pressure from other settlers to take a strong and decisive stand against the "blacks". How much should he share his worries with his wife? While Sal remains William's moral compass, Grenville uses the changing levels of the couple's intimacy as a delicate barometer to reflect which side of his inner conflict is gaining the upper hand. In the end, William is forced to take the most fateful decision of his life: it sets the direction for his future in more ways than is to be expected. While he may have convinced himself that he HAS become "another person altogether", the question nevertheless lingers for the reader for quite some time.
Kate Grenville has presented us with an essential book, the importance of which reaches far beyond Australia and the early (and later) treatment of its aboriginal peoples. Through an engaging and dramatic narrative, she has painted a portrait of a group of people, centred around William Thornhill, all in a way representative for early settlers, their challenges and missed opportunities or not. She is letting the facts speak for themselves and the different voices present their individual standpoints. Rather than moralizing with the 20/20 perspective of hindsight, she gives the reader much food for thought and reflection and instils the curiosity for more reading on the early history of Australia. [Friederike Knabe]
Summary of The Secret River
In 1806 William Thornhill, an illiterate English bargeman and a man of quick temper but deep compassion, steals a load of wood and, as a part of his lenient sentence, is deported, along with his beloved wife, Sal, to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. The Secret River is the tale of William and Sal?s deep love for their small, exotic corner of the new world, and William?s gradual realization that if he wants to make a home for his family, he must forcibly take the land from the people who came before him. Acclaimed around the world, The Secret River is a magnificent, transporting work of historical fiction.
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