Barbara Ewing: The Trespass

By MARGIE THOMSON

Who says you can't tell a book by its cover? This one's jacket lets you know, perfectly, what to expect: the young woman (Victorian lace collar proclaiming her era) is beautiful yet wary, possibly afraid. The dark little sailing ship and the jagged rocks spell danger, escape. All in all, it murmurs "romance", and if that's a genre you enjoy, you'll be glad to know this is a good, historical one.

But it's no bodice-ripper - or only in the most sinister sense - and there are few, if any, heaving bosoms.

Ewing might write accessibly and tell a ripping good story, but her passion is also for ideas. The Trespass includes some dark currents, particularly to do with the predicament and powerlessness of women in that age, epitomised in this story of a young woman unable to prevent her father raping her, so constrained by social mores that she cannot even find the words to tell anyone what is happening to her.

It is a fetid, disease-ridden world that Ewing evokes, this London of 1849, swept by a cholera epidemic that was a result of filthy drinking water.

She spotlights the bloody-minded profiteering of the men who controlled and profited from the Water Boards, who used their influence to prevent legislative reform that could have improved the living standards and health of the poor.

And, along with capturing the enormous excitement and idealism inspired by the new colonies that were just beginning to open up to settlers, she does not forget the issues around taking land from indigenous people, and the sale of that land, often unfarmable, to unsuspecting colonists by the New Zealand Company.

Most of the story takes place in England. Harriet, our 17-year-old heroine, is the youngest daughter of Sir Charles Cooper, an MP with a lot of money invested in the Water Boards - a truly villainous character whose eminent social standing prevents almost everyone from recognising the tyrant he is at home.

Harriet is moved by her father to the countryside out of the way of the cholera, which is proving a good deal more socially blind than the milieu in which she lives.

There, in Kent, she is exposed to talk of the colonies. Promoters of Canada, Australia and New Zealand are offering free passage to those with the requisite skills - and are an inspiration to those second sons such as Harriet's cousin Edward, whose opportunities in the Old Country are limited.

When her beloved sister Mary, left behind in London, dies, Harriet must plan her escape. Why not flee to a new place where new ideas might take hold, and where she imagines a woman might find greater freedom than seems possible in socially straitjacketed England?

Thus ensues a wild chase across more than 19,000km of ocean, towards a dramatic ending that is, of course, really a beginning in a new place. Ewing keeps the pace up right to the (melo)dramatic ending.

But there are some ways in which Ewing defies the genre: for her, love and sex are not simple things but complex, their original simplicity stripped away and tainted by social expectation and tawdry life experience; wicked deeds have lasting psychological consequences; old paradigms are not easily thrown away; heroes and villains are not (apart from one or two exceptions) simple, black and white creations.

Ewing's heroine would appal Barbara Cartland: she is beautiful but determined not to marry; she prefers to dream of educating herself and others; she is not beguiled by the handsome face of her aristocratic suitor.

Ewing has clearly had fun with this novel, breathing life to an age long past, encapsulating the debates rampant at the time, over the existence of God, the meaning of scientific discovery.

Even Charles Darwin makes it on to the pages, a bit-part it's true, but he gets to say: "There is something more to the human heart than science, all the same."

This, of course, is something that romantic novelists and their many happy readers have known all along.

TimeWarner

$34.95