- It pains me to say so, but the power of this beautifully written novel is undermined by a fatal narrative flaw.
- Kent’s focus in her three novels to date has been small communities under immense stress, where goodness and truth are challenged but are eventually victorious. They are all set in the early 1800’s: Burial Rites in Iceland, The Good People in Ireland, and Devotion in Prussia and South Australia.
- Kent is a writer of enormous talent. Her prose is simply beautiful with a light, sensitive and poetic touch. She is also a gifted storyteller who brings her characters and settings vibrantly to life. The central focus of Devotion is the intensity of the love between two young women, something foreign and forbidden in those times and particularly in conservative religious communities.
- I'm reluctant to disclose the flaw in the novel as it may be perceived as a spoiler. But I can't critique the novel without doing it. The narrator, the young teenager Hanna, actually dies on the disease ridden boat transporting her persecuted Lutheran community from their small village in Prussia to the new colony of South Australia. However, ghostlike, she continues to narrate, telling the story of all subsequent events, including her own burial at sea. By employing this device Kent has abused every genre of historical fiction. To me it was alienating in the extreme.
- The ghost is invisible to everyone. People pass through her body, but she has all her senses. The wind blows her hair and she feels the cold. She refers to her former life as ‘…my living years’. By indulging in this device Kent is having it both ways. It enables her to explore the intensity of same-sex love and intimacy while forgoing engaging with the real world challenges it brings. She is quite capable of conveying the drama of that, but she refuses to do so.
- As an isolated spirit, surprised she's not at the right hand of God, Hanna has insights and asks questions that may not have occurred to her while living. She begins to doubt religious belief: My parents’ belief that my death was the will of God broke my heart.
- And she recognises and embraces her sexual orientation, her obsessive love for Thea. At one point she sees through a window two beautiful men who…shared such an intense look of affection and desire that I was jealous.
- She also celebrates Thea's mother, Anna Maria, accused of being a witch by some fervent Christian believers, as a woman of science and nature, not religious superstition. Anna Maria is the first to welcome the Indigenous peoples on the land (the Peramangk people) as friends. She learns about food sources from them - grubs, yabbies, ant larvae, bird eggs, nectar. The new white arrivals, at first starving, are fed and saved.
- Thea, rendered so desperately unhappy by Hanna's death, is forced by tradition to marry the young Hans and they have a son. But she still yearns for her real love Hanna to be an intimate part of her life.
- Of course, as Hanna has always known, the only way that can happen is if Thea dies and joins her in the spirit world.
- So, guess what, after Thea is bitten by a snake, of all things, that happens. Felicitous resolution for sure.
