KEY POINTS:
Last year, when Australian writer Kate Grenville came to the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival to talk about her chilling historical novel The Secret River, she said she had started work on another novel tapping into the earliest days of the colony.
The Lieutenant is that book, and it is another dazzling and disturbing achievement. While The Secret River portrayed the impact of white "settlers" - freed convicts - on the Aboriginal people who inhabited the Hawkesbury River region in the first decade of the 19th century, The Lieutenant goes further back, to the first fleet of convicts and marines to arrive in Sydney cove in 1788.
The story centres around young Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, a shy maths, linguistics and astronomy wizard considered so clever as a child he received a bursary to study at the Portsmouth Naval Academy. But his education at the academy had only intensified his awkwardness and loneliness, and because he came from a working class family, he was a target for bullying from the less-clever rich boys.
Rooke's pre-Australia history is important because Grenville is carefully painting his maturing character, as he learns "true cleverness ... became a kind of shame, a secret thing to be indulged only in private". Rooke doesn't know how to have a conversation and finds internal solace in the logic of figures and language. When he turns 15, he enters, as so many boys did, His Majesty's Marine Forces. Britain is at war with the American colonies.
On board the Reso-lution, he makes friends with an ambitious, smooth young marine, Talbot Silk, a man who will become significant later on in Sydney cove. For now, Rooke uses Silk as a model, watching him to learn how to behave in the company of others, "inventing an acceptable version of himself". Rooke believes life in the navy will never end, that this is the shape of his future.
In Antigua, he witnesses the price of disobedience when he must watch the leader of a mutiny hang and his followers struck off and sent into oblivion. Then, in 1781, he is badly wounded in an engagement with the French and has to take long leave to recover. Two years later, the British have lost the war with the American rebels.
Rooke's future is being dismantled. Where can he go? To New South Wales, with the first shipment of convicts, as expedition astronomer to witness the expected arrival of Halley's Comet in 1788. Silk is on the same expedition. This is where Grenville has struck gold. The Lieutenant was inspired by the true story of a young lieutenant called William Dawes, whose notebooks she discovered a few years ago, leading the way to further meticulous research. Dawes' story is Rooke's story: an astronomer, mathematician and linguist, who travelled with the first fleet, set up a rough observatory and formed a relationship with the local Gadigal people, learning their language and recording conversations with them in the notebooks.
This is precisely what Rooke does, and Grenville's descriptions of the encounters between Rooke and the Gadigal, especially a young girl called Tagaran, are wonderfully shimmering and authentic. Rooke is fascinated by these dignified people, and for the first time in his life, feels a deep empathy. They like him too. On the other hand, his fellow marines and convicts are racist and ignorant. They are there to take over the land and the Aboriginal people are black, naked and disposable. They are nothing.
At first the governor orders that the "natives" are to be treated with kindness but then a series of blunders - like kidnapping two native men to teach them English - leads to an escalation of mistrust and fear, on both sides. Rooke, who has removed himself away from the main group and sleeps in a hut-cum-observatory, is making great progress with his friendship with Tagaran and her clan. Rooke is content to the point of euphoria. It cannot last. Things start to go awry when Silk discovers Rooke's notebooks and corrupts the purity of the relationship between the young astronomer and Taragan. Rooke feels "a disturbance in the air, a tremor in his sense of himself".
A white man beats one of the Aboriginal men. A white man is speared. And Rooke is ordered to join Silk in a party to "bring in" six natives - or their heads as trophies. To say any more would be unfair but the outcome is neither obvious or expected. What happens in the book is, more or less, what happened to Dawes. The Lieutenant is a gripping, fastidiously written tale and I couldn't put it down.
The Lieutenant
By Kate Grenville (Text $45, out Monday)
