Arabella Edge: The Company

By PAT BASKETT

Fine prose, like poetry, transcends mere meaning, invokes a world of sound and image where each sentence is an object of admiration.

Arabella Edge's language can stop you in your tracks: "Fat, sweet goblets of rain pucker the slack-bellied ocean ... "

Her descriptions have a searing clarity that is consistently outlandish and the miracle is that she achieves this with never a clang or overblown image.

Moreover, her enjoyment in the process communicates itself deliciously and you can almost hear her laughing as she writes this tragi-comic tale. It won her the Best First Book award in the 2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the South-east Asia and South Pacific region.

The story is based on the voyage of the Dutch East India Company flagship Batavia which was wrecked off the western Australian coast in 1629 after the failure of a plot by some members of the crew to abscond with the immense riches the ship carried in its hold. The known facts of that disaster have been well documented and Edge lists those accounts.

Fiction enters in her exploration of the principal character, Jeronimus Cornelisz, whom she describes as a psychopath.

Edge begins her story with Cornelisz' early life in Amsterdam during a period in Netherlands history known as the Golden Age. Exploration had revealed the immense resources of new lands and the East India Company was formed for their exploitation - the eponymous company.

"Amsterdam, amphibious, slippery city," she writes, where "monstrous cathedrals of wealth now soar against the skyline: the Exchange Bank, the Lending Bank ... "

Gold is the company's God and we know exactly what she means.

Amsterdam was also a hotbed of religious dissent and Cornelisz, an apothecary or a necromancer depending on the uses to which his potions are put, becomes an atheist very young when his own poisons kill the servant girl he was lusting after.

"That traitor, Jesus," he declaims.

Later, when he rules the camp of survivors from the shipwreck, Cornelisz inculcates into his apostles that for them there is neither good nor evil, only freedom.

"Murder, don't make me laugh,"he says after a particularly grotesque act. "These people have chosen their destinies."

Of course his band of acolytes are all men. Lucretia, the woman he attempts to overcome, remains impervious to insult or tenderness, an enigmatic, symbolic figure.

There is no foil to Cornelisz. The preacher is a buffoon who is helpless to raise any opposition to Cornelisz' despotic rule.

The ending is appropriately gruesome and provokes questions similar to those evoked by other writers, particularly William Golding whose novel Lord of the Flies Edge mentions in a wonderful sleight. Not even the occasional anachronism can mar the momentum of her prose - they come across as tongue-in-cheek reminders, purposely put there to keep us on our toes.

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.

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