On a romp of a quest across colonial Tasmania

FICTION
A Treacherous Country
K.M. Kruimink
Allen & Unwin, $29.99

How strange the ways of fiction can be. K.M. (Kate) Kruimink has just won the Vogel, the celebrated award for a young writer, and she writes prose like this: ‘‘How came I to a place like this? What spirit drew me here?’’ That’s the opening. Or: ‘‘She was like a horse cut out of the night sky, throwing a rippling shadow against the brothel’s brick wall, gazing beyond one to Elysium with eyes like enormous drops of ink.’’

This is what the author, in a burst of what she might imagine to be period practice, would call a Historical Novel. If an editor laboured over it, she might get the prose sounding a bit like that great trashmeister Daphne Du Maurier, but Charlotte Bronte it ain’t.

Well, there’s more to a bit of fiction, even period fiction, than the prose it’s couched in. Kruimink has written an evocative novel about convict Tasmania. The period is the 1840s – though it sounds earlier – and it’s all about a young gent (whose dad is some kind of landed creep) who comes to the Apple Isle in quest of a lass transported long ago who also bears the image of the girl he’d like to marry.

It’s an odd story. The hero comes bearing harpoons and at one stage in an extended episode he’s involved in a breakneck death-defying whale hunt.

He also comes with a manservant who he refers to as a ‘‘cannibal’’. The trouble is the cannibal speaks French and it rapidly becomes clear that this wise and cultivated Irishman is a good deal sharper than his master. Quite late in the piece he translates something the hero’s mother said to him, in French: ‘‘God guard me from those I trust.’’

It’s a wise remark, at the edge of cynicism, and it underlies an odd, even quaint novel in which bizarre things are visited on women for no good reason at all.

The hero’s mother we discover when the novel is quite advanced becomes distressed and is then treated with pitiless cruelty by his father. Nothing is quite what it seems in this shrouded, high-toned saga in which bushrangers appear from nowhere to steal horses that have already been stolen and women of every kind – superb ladies, prostitutes, sellers of rabbit pies that turn out to be something worse – all tend to know more than they say.

A Treacherous Country is both a ripping yarn – much of it in a mock-operatic dialect that was never heard on land or sea – and a stealthy meditation on the mystery of the world and the heartbreak at the back of human cruelty. Kruimink has dressed up in pastiche a kind of drawn out thriller about appearance and reality.

The vision that lurks in the back of A Treacherous Country is of a world that will exile its own, and more particularly the women it abuses, to the end of the earth. But this purgatory where things rot and perish is in constant danger of being usurped by cheerful urchins and sage Irish people with a sense of humour. It’s an unusual book and it’s just possible to glimpse the way this deformation of a historical novel could turn the heads of judges faced with more conventional fare. Kruimink is unusual because she plunges headlong into a lake of darkness without knowing how to angle her way out or in what narrative language.

The result is bewildering and bizarre but it does create a kind of nightmare image of convict and colonial Australia like no other. It makes the masterpieces in this area, Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore and Tom Keneally’s Bring Larks And Heroes look neoclassical by comparison.

A Treacherous Country is a confused novel about a makeshift world in which men and women betray each other and unbright people stumble towards goodness.

If it’s your poison then you have a stronger stomach than I, but there’s no doubting Kruimink’s intensity of purpose nor the way in which the book fits the niche of a Gothic quest novel with a feminist slant. This is not likely to be one of the Vogels that reflect the judges hunches of future literary greatness, but it does have a luridly lit sense of romance and it does exhibit a willingness on the writer’s part to grope in the guts of the world and to wrestle with the slime and horror of betrayal.