Jock Serong, The Burning Island.

 

- Jock Serong can tell a story, infusing it with constant drama and tension, and bringing historical characters and narratives vividly to life. This novel is a sequel to his magnificent Preservation, published in 2018. (I reviewed that novel here)

- His prose is beautiful, often poetic, as are his descriptions of the natural world and its rhythms and colours. And he speaks deeply and movingly about the essence of love and the value of rich personal, family and social relationships. 

- In 1830 Mr Srinivas, now a wealthy timber merchant, organises a boat voyage on the Moonbird down to The Furneaux Group of islands to the north of Van Diemen’s Land to look for clues as to how a previous voyage on the Howrah disappeared. The supposition is that Mr Figge, an evil, murderous man featured in Preservation, was responsible. 

- The collection of characters brought together by Srinivas come across at first as a strange and rather tedious lot. Eliza Grayling, a stern teacher; her father Joshua, a hopeless drunk and now rendered blind; the schooner’s master who wears dresses and hair combs; two young twins and deck hands, uneducated and constantly fighting; and a Doctor Gideon, an amateur scientist and a fervent Christian, or so it seems. 

- There are incidents on the way, all seemingly unconnected. This happened, then that happened, then that happened...I began to yearn for some meaning, some overarching vision to bring it all together and enrich it. Preservation was deeply meaningful in contrast, a harsh critique of the early days of the Sydney colony and its savage treatment of the Indigenous inhabitants. 

- However, deep into the story the various elements do come together and start to form a rich brew indeed. New characters emerge, inhabitants of the various small islands in Bass's Straight. For instance the gun-carrying and proud native woman from Penguin Island: As another woman told it ‘She talked to the people, men, women, an she said we gonna take the settlers down. An she meant it. All that bad treatment, all them beatings, she wanted to take it out on the squatters, an the troopers an...she didn’t care who, as long as it was white men.’

- The tension builds. The Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, for example, commands the capture and re-education of all the Aboriginal people on the islands. They are to be rounded up and Christianised, ‘saved’ from their squalor. 

- Serong constructs a very satisfying conclusion indeed, apart from one key thing that's left hanging. There has to be a third in this series, and that will be well worth waiting for.