The benevolent Dr Adair introduces his pupil to the Astronomer Royal, Dr Vickery, but there are few opportunities in astronomy for such a boy. It's a heady experience, and the reader shares the excitement of his widening consciousness. "Most of all," we are told, "the heavens were transformed by the Academy's instruction in astronomy and navigation." Rooke contemplates the universe in terms "intuited by a German called Mr Kepler and proved by an Englishman called Mr Newton". He revels in everything from mathematical problems to Latin declensions. In The Lieutenant, Rooke's thoughts and perceptions take centre stage the whole world unfurls from his viewpoint, and little escapes his capacious intellect. The focus of The Secret River was the highly circumscribed mind of Thornhill. Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness.
There he first begins to parse the class system, discovering that, although in the world of Church Street, where he grew up, his father was "a man of education and standing, a father to be proud of", in this new environment he becomes "an embarrassment". She introduces him to Dr Adair, who secures him a bursary at the Portsmouth Naval Academy. At school, his teacher singles him out as a child with uncanny mathematical intuitions. Many of the themes of this novel recur in The Lieutenant, which centres on Daniel Rooke, a young fellow from Portsmouth who has remarkable gifts. As the settlers laid claims to land occupied by Aboriginal people, conflicts of interest arose. In this hauntingly beautiful, terrifying landscape, her protagonist, William Thornhill, discovered opportunities - and problems. T he Australian writer Kate Grenville made a deep impression on the reading public with her last novel, The Secret River (2005), an engaging tale of an English thief in the early 19th century who had his death sentence commuted to life in the wilderness of New South Wales (see Book club).
0 kommentar(er)
