FICTION
A Great Act of Love
Heather Rose
Allen & Unwin, $34.99

Praise be. It is not a dark and stormy night as Heather Rose’s new novel opens but a warm midsummer evening, 1836, London. The moon is full and Caroline, responding to her father’s whistle from the pavement, rushes up the stairs for this unexpected meeting.

His manner is agitated, his skin ashen and when she reaches for his hand she is cut by a short knife covered in blood. She takes it from him and flings it into the Thames. He walks away into the shadows and Caroline, a mere slip of a girl, retreats into a terrible solitude.

Heather Rose is esteemed by those who award literary prizes but she has the distinction of also being adored by readers of popular fiction. She is restless with her gifts, writing about and across art, politics, contemporary families, is a memoirist, a writer for children and adolescents.

A Great Act of Love is her sixth adult novel but her first historical, and it cracks along with a masterly gusto.

The melodramatic opening, a staged setting detailed with visual cues, sets the pace and the tone. Expectations rise as the curtain swings up, the candlelit stage is poised, the characters enter from upstage and down and often across. But. What’s this? What? You bend forward in your seat.

The dress and props are all early Victorian, yet the characters seem to have bent time. These elaborately dressed people might dress with the formality of the past, but they are from the present, from 2025. The Bridgerton influence? How daring. And sometimes, how darling.

Within a dozen pages, years have flown and Caroline has a new occupation involving disguises, chess, thievery, money and gender-slippage. She is under the tutelage of her father’s accomplished sister, Henriette, a woman of the future as well as the past.

Meanwhile, her father, who in a moment of insanity murdered a woman, has been sentenced to death. The Crown, however, isn’t keen on hanging the insane, and he has been transported to Australia, where he will live out the term of his natural life in a grim place on the edge of the world, Norfolk Island.

Caroline, now a well-educated woman in her early 20s, has visions and dreams of her father as a boy, walking through his ancestral vineyards in France – vineyards that once produced the most celebrated champagne in France. Her father is the central love of her life. He understood her, educated her, gave her his knowledge of botany and medicine as she worked beside him in his London apothecary business.

This specialised education sustains her throughout her life as she goes on a quest to reunite with her father. Can a young woman dream herself into another world, another person?

At 23, she takes a ship to America and from there books a passage which, she hopes, will take her to Van Diemen’s Land. Her disguise is that of a young and wealthy widow – an immaculate guise for a woman whom men instantly admire. Yet, a disguise is maybe a possibility that can become a reality. We all make ourselves up as we go, changing, or not, in the face of need, or peril.

In her quest to see her father again, Caroline understands she is a woman who must summon a new story every day in order to live. She is, like all those other women who imagine themselves into being, Scheherazade.

Rose is an ingenious Scheherazade herself, holding the intricacies, aka chaos, of several lives together and organising them into a generally coherent and generally satisfying whole that is casually called history.

Caroline, as unbelievable as every other heroine, lives a long life in a small world and, because she’s such a dashing creature, any reader wants to know What Happened, and Then? And Then?

Yet there could be a warning: Caroline tells her story, casting her inventions into the future, but she is aware that her stories are, after all, just stories when to her – it was just one life, her life.

She has this beautiful line: But what of time and the chalice of the human heart? This is an enquiry and a mapping of both. And entertaining to boot.

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