Annamarie Jagose: Slow Water

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

In 1836 English evangelist William Yate boarded the Prince Regent at Gravesend to return to New Zealand to his beloved mission at Waimate.

But during that four-month voyage he and third mate Edwin Denison fell in love. Arriving in Sydney, Yate was turned upon by some of his fellow voyagers, betrayed to church and civic authorities, dismissed from the Church Missionary Society and came within inches of hanging.

University of Melbourne lecturer Jagose, a New Zealander who has lived in Australia for a decade, applies her academic skills to telling Yate's true story. She offers us a wealth of physical, period detail in a rich study of social relationships and the mannerisms of an era. Human characteristics are so well drawn that we may recognise ourselves in these pre-Victorian ladies, gentlemen and ruffians of first class, steerage and crew.

Love, innocence, hypocrisy and betrayal are the vast, endlessly fascinating territories in which she has set her story, although it's plotted almost entirely within the tiny, claustrophobic world of a 19th-century sailing ship.

It is a world not quite of this world. Once they leave England, the only indication those aboard the Prince Regent have that they are not alone on the planet are those other few vessels that for some days are to be seen "strung out whitely in front and behind like ... a pearl necklace".

And so, for a while at least, the characters seem to forget themselves: adulteries take place, promises made on shore slide out of focus, and the law on homosexual acts seems entirely forgotten, so Yate and Denison's relationship grows in a bubble of innocence with a surprising lack of subterfuge, and no reference to sin or consequence.

It's easy to laugh at a culture that is not our own, and lines such as, "Mrs Taylor was hoisted aboard, her legs covered with the Union Jack" are what we might expect from a clever writer from our own era writing wittily about that more uptight time. Comic or ironic observation is a large part of the flavour of this story, but Jagose creates characters who epitomise their era, yet whose idiosyncrasies or quirks of thinking let them fly free of stereotyping.

Carelessness does not exist in these pages; nothing has been left to chance. Jagose's love of language permeates every sentence.

Yate, as we first catch sight of him, is "thirty-three, spark-eyed, pale-faced, with the hunched shoulder and high, cautious footwork of a wading fowl".

A cabin-boy, perched at the maintop, sees the world "split open beneath him and is struck by a giddying sense of his infinitesimal worth - not the sense that he was valued at nothing, but the realisation that the world would be some incalculable fraction worse off, would be diminished minutely but all the same diminished, if he were not of it".

A character imagines drowning, "her life streaming from her nostrils in bubbled ropes of pearly light".

The pace of the narrative is as slow as the title suggests, although this leisureliness is quite at odds with the expectations sparked by the raised print on the cover, which must be a kind of publisher's joke, an ironic nod in the direction of the kind of pot-boiling, plot-driven historical romance this book is not.

Pressure builds very slowly to an almost unbearable level, so that when, about halfway through, the tension explodes, it does so with a surprising force and eroticism. Perhaps quite deliberately, there is no bodice-ripping (although that course of action is considered, and then rejected, by one philanderer) but there is quite a bit of unbuttoning of trouser-fronts, especially as the equator approaches.

The novel's many voices and overall tone seem to grow quite authentically from the novel's era, although with an awareness of Jagose's modern audience.

Her punctuation is unusual: paragraphs can go on for much longer than a page and there are no speech marks, which slows the reader to start with, but soon becomes normalised and has an odd effect, equalising and confusing what is said and not said.

Jagose has said her interest in Yate's story was sparked by the fact that in the three surviving shipboard journals of that voyage, no complaints were recorded against him, in dramatic contrast to the vilification which appeared, seemingly out of the blue, once he arrived in Sydney. In that sense she has set out to unravel a mystery, and the answers lie in the characterisations she creates. It is a tragedy and at the centre of it lie those old culprits, vanity and moral hypocrisy.

And it was a tragedy for Yate. All the hopefulness he displays at the beginning of the journey - touchingly symbolised by his box of bulbs for planting in his adopted home - is in tatters by book's end.

He never returned to New Zealand. He may well have been unwise and foolish (and may or may not have been an exploiter of those he came to New Zealand to save), but Jagose wants us to see that he was also a vulnerable man, transformed but brought down by love - a perfect character, in other words, breathed into life by an extraordinary writer.

VUP, $29.95