Krishna
This book is great in showing how someone who looks at things in the past people may misconstrue the importance of people and elevate some to sainthood while, when you look at what they did from a different angle, they themselves are floundering trying to make sense of mundane things. Interesting? Yes. Unfortunately, entertaining, it is not. That is the issue. Let us look at the story.
Two girls and a boy in Australia, near Queensland. One of the girls is Janet. the elder of the two. The boy is Lachlan Beattie. He surprises a savage who claims that he is a British object. They bring the savage to their village outpost. He is a gibbering idiot and the explanation given was that he got lost in the unexplored parts of Australia (the story happens when Australia was being just colonized bit by bit) and he ‘lived with the blacks’. Interesting.
He remembers washing ashore, lying naked, and adopted by a group of naked aboriginal people. He is adopted by the new village, especially by the three kids who take upon themselves to ‘civilize’ him.
He causes fear and resentment by acting black, as that was how he was brought up from boyhood, and others are suspicious that he is a spy out to betray them in an ambush at night with this erstwhile tribe while the villagers slept.
The teacher in Australia was sent there by his patron, who paid for his education. The school teacher, Abbot is a character that comes and goes.
The suspicions of the white people and the extent to which some rowdy characters go to show animosity are all well told.
Gemmy, the native, remembers his past story in England where he was kept by a thug for collecting rats to sell for races and kept in pitiable conditions but offered protection from destitution at the same time.
But then it all goes down to the deep doldrums soon thereafter with the teacher and another young man trying to impress Leona, a young girl and Gemmy’s conviction that the magic squiggles (his life story as dictated to the teacher and written down) had sucked the life out of him and his attempts to get the papers back. Then he walks away.
The story moves a number of years where you see where the three children are. As far as I can see, there was no point in it. Lachlan is a government minister and Janet is Sister Monica in an abbey.
Meh.
3/ 10
– – Krishna (August 2017)