- The Observer,
- Sunday April 2 2000
English Passengers
Matthew Kneale
Hamish Hamilton £15.99, pp462
Buy it at BOL
The oldest profession was not prostitution but taxonomy, the moment when Adam named the plants and animals in the Garden of Eden. Ironically, it was natural scientists, as well as geologists and physicists, who did for those biblical literalists who believed in the Garden of Eden and the Creation myth, and replaced it with the evolutionary narrative that most of us subscribe to today. Nor was the mythic garden the only paradise they destroyed. Matthew Kneale's new novel is a fine piece of historical fiction that reminds us that men of science and men of God were both agents of genocidal imperialism.
It is a story of vanity and obsession. The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, stuck in an unsatisfying Yorkshire parish with an unsatisfied wife, is horrified by the claims of 'atheist geologists' that some of the rocks on Earth are hundreds of thousands of years old, refuting the Scriptural assertion that the Earth was created only 6,000 years earlier. He conceives a theory of 'divine refrigeration' to explain the rapid cooling of rocks and, after a dream, becomes convinced that the Garden of Eden was not in Arabia but Tasmania and might still be found there. A philanthropist stumps up for a voyage to vindicate the thesis.
Wilson approaches his quest for Eden with a zealotry that owes as much to a desire for fame as to the desire to reaffirm the grounds of his faith. Alongside him on the expedition is a surgeon, Dr Potter, an equally fame-hungry man with a different agenda. He is working on a thesis concerning the superiority of the Saxon race over the Celts, Hindus, Africans and other lesser peoples.
Potter and Wilson do not get on; confining their insufferable egos on a long sea voyage makes for considerable friction. As the result of unrest in India, the men are forced to charter a ship run by Manx smugglers, led by Captain Kewley. Kewley's once wealthy family has lost status and wealth with every passing generation. The tensions, lack of decent maps and the depredations of nineteenth-century seafaring trigger a series of events that lead to the unexpected twists, revenges, tragedies and surprising decencies of its conclusion.
The book is narrated by a host of characters, most notably Peevay, the child of a fearsome female aborigine warrior and the white convict who raped her. His descriptions of the white settlers' cruelties, and his own confusions as his world vanishes, counterbalance the arrogance of the governors, farmers, soldiers and missionaries.
For all its grimness - and the decline of the Tasmanian aborigines in Christian 'villages' is movingly rendered - this is a pleasantly witty book. Kewley turns out to be a decent cove, and his accounts, shot through with Manx cuss-words, show Reverend Wilson and Dr Potter at their very worst. Not that the two men do themselves any favours; Wilson's mincing English, all circumlocution and false piety, never fails to betray his selfishness and weakness, while Potter's notebook bigotry is short on prepositions and heavy on underlining, the style of lunatic letter-writers through history. All of this makes for a more intelligent and fulfilling book than the subject matter might suggest.
