"English Passengers" by Matthew Kneale

Manxman Captain Kewley has built himself a sailing ship with a secret hold for contraband goods. But his first attempt at smuggling goes badly awry: to save himself he must carry three Enmglishmen: a Reverend, a Doctor and a Botanist, to Tasmania where the reverend believes they will discover the Garden of Eden. The voyage is marked by the Captain and his crew repeatedly getting into scrapes and escaping by the skin of their teeth.

When they reach Tasmania they hire as native guide an old man who was born as a result of a rape: his father was an escaped convict and his mother was an aboriginal woman. From his life story we discover the chilling true story of how the Tasmanian aborigines were exterminated; from his father's story we learn about the treatment of the convicts. The book is a compendium of human inhumanity.

The story is told through the testimonies of each of the witnesses, including but not limited to the main characters.Each character has a distinguishable voice and, although this technique fragments the narrative, the plot remains clear. In the end, though, the author seems to have rejected a conventional structure for the book in favour of a picaresque. Although, in the end, each character receives a resolution and often one involving poetic justice, the path to that resolution twists and turns, defying expectations.

This book has superb characterisations and drops you right into the scene and confronts you with the horror and the pity of colonialism at its rawest.

There are some delightful moments:

• "As the wise man says, Choose you lies like you choose your wife, with care." (C 1)
• "London dimly glinting in the distance through its own dust." (C 1)
• "Smash a man to pieces and he will look much the same, regardless of his skin or manner of speech." (C 2)
• "As any fool will tell you, there's near and there's near, and the two are different as pigs and parakeets." (C 3)
• "That had seemed clear enough at the time, but then directions usually do when you're still months and miles off from needing them." (C 3)
• "It's a fact that what seems light as daisies for a minute becomes heavy as rocks when you're hauling it mile after mile." (C 6)
• "Sheppard who was doing the cherubs ... wasn't much skilled at them ... and they never looked like flying babies so much as fat boys with something nasty flapping on their backs." (C 8)
• "It is hard, though, to get lovings in a dying place." (C 10)
• "It is hard to choose dying. Dying chooses you." (C 10)
• "My surprise would be fresh as last month's herring." (C 14)

Nominated for the 2000 Booker Prize; winner of the 2009 Whitbread Novel award.

July 2020; 458 pages This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God