English Passengers

Matthew Kneale's novel, English Passengers, is a tragedy in the truest sense, a farce of biting satire, and a bludgeoning social critique. The narrative follows two separate trajectories which intersect only briefly, towards the end of the book, and then again diverge: two stories that could well have been two separate books. However, telling us these two stories in parallel brings us different insights into the characters, situations, and social reality of the Victorian world, as one story illuminates the other. Also, one of the stories provides an element of dark comedy, leavening what would be an otherwise entirely bleak tale. Kneale's ability to make distinctive and authentic nearly every one of the book's full chorus of voices is masterful, but his mastery goes beyond even that.

The opening narrative concerns three amusingly mismatched Englishmen and their unhappy crew from the Isle of Man as they voyage from England to farthest shores of wild, rugged, and unexplored Tasmania, during the years 1957 and 1958. This tale is fully farcical and its characters are caricatures. Nevertheless, it meaningfully dramatizes the prevalent Victorian-era social thought regarding ideas of social progress and English superiority. The English passengers of the title are Reverend Wilson and Dr. Potter, who gain passage on a Manx smuggling vessel. Wilson is on a mission to prove Tasmania was the original home to the Garden of Eden while Potter wishes to test out his theory of human racial differences, comically giving life to the cultural assumptions propelling colonialism as they were projected by both the religion and science of the day. Though some may look at these fictional characters and write them off as absurd, extreme, or sinister, they are, in fact, nothing of the kind; they are realistically representative of many respectable thinkers of their day who gave voice to, rationalized, and systematized their cultural assumptions, doing the important work of explaining away the rapacity of the British empire—exactly as it was done by very real people in very real history. Meanwhile, the ship's priceless Captain Kewley steers the long narrative through its comedy of errors and also provides a certain moral ballast as one of the book's few reliable narrators.

By contrast, the parallel narrative sticks closer to the ground, concerning itself with the experiences of settlers and aborigines of Tasmania during the 38 years from 1820 through 1858. Some of the settlers are convicts, others are business people and farmers who came to make a new life or big profits in a new land. Through their many voices, we come to witness how even well-meaning people end up participating in—often even condoning—realities as barbaric as genocide. Those few English who might truly recognize the humanity of the aborigines are sidelined, considered trouble-making extremists; more typical folk, wholly unconscious of the cultural assumptions and ideologies which guide their attitudes and actions—those same assumptions which are, in plain ugliness, epitomized by Rev. Wilson and Dr. Potter—inflict damage with their good intentions. Meanwhile, the settlers who don't care at all are openly barbaric. And around them all, supported by the same set of ideas, the English penal system promotes its own flavor of barbarity in the name of progress. It's a starkly real portrait of the times.

While most of the settlers' voices make cameo appearances, the most constant character in this second narrative is that of the tragic Peevay, an aborigine, the unloved son of a resourceful, indomitable, and viciously angry aboriginal mother and a rapist English father. It is through Peevay's smart, moderately self-reflective voice—a colorfully applied mish-mash of second-hand English learned from soldiers and preachers—that we see the destruction of a people and their way of life. Many of the characters in this part of the book are closely based upon actual historical figures in colonial Tasmania.

Based on the novel's timelines, the reader realizes that by the time these two narratives intersect, it can only be after Peevay is a full-grown man and his people are already destroyed. But when it finally happens, we have a different understanding of Peevay than we otherwise might have had, so that we may be less inclined to leap to easy judgments. As good Captain Kewley asks us in the opening paragraph, himself blithely unaware of the darker matters narrated within this book:

Say a man catches a bullet through his skull in somebody's war, so where's the beginning of that? You might say that's easy. That little moment has its start the day our hero goes marching off to fight with his new soldier friends, all clever and smirking and waving at the girls. But does it, though? Why not the moment he first takes the schilling, his mouth hanging wide open like a harvest frog as he listens to the sergeant's flatterings? Or how about that bright sunny morning when he's just turned six and sees soldiers striding down the street, fierce and jangling? But then why not go right back, all the way, to that long, still night when a little baby is born, staring and new, with tiniest little hands? Hands you'd never think would grow strong enough one day to lift a heavy gun, and put a bullet through our poor dead friend's brain.

And so as readers, we are challenged: Where does a story really begin? And, beneath the face of it, whose story is it?

Comments

[Ruchira Paul]

Off topic here.

Hope you and Namit have a great trip to China. Will look forward to the photo-journal upon your return. Make sure that Namit doesn't get too cocky and starts taking too many candid shots - at Chinese toy and pet food factories, for example.

Also, you can check it out for yourselves if you can access the website from any place at all within your itinerary.

Have a great time.

[Usha]

Thanks for the good wishes, Ruchira. I'm really looking forward to this trip.

I believe we already know that this blog is not accessible from China. But I'm sure we'll be curious to test it for ourselves when we get a chance!