More Kafka than Clarke; better for it

A Treacherous Country is closer to Franz Kafka than Marcus Clarke. It’s a parable wrapped in a melodrama.

Tasmanian author Katherine Kruimink. Picture: Chris Crerar

We first meet Gabriel Fox, superfluous third son of a Norfolk squire, atop a faded nag a day’s ride north of Hobart. It’s in the mid-1840s and Fox is in his mid-20s. Neither he nor the reader is sure what has brought him to this place and moment, on a windswept road at the end of the known world.

His situation is soon explained, though hardly clarified. Fox has been taken under wing by an Irishman — hirsute and dentally challenged (the young gentleman privately calls him ‘‘my Cannibal”) — whom he met in a malodorous tavern in Hobart Town the night before.

William O’Riordan, to return the Irishman his true name, suggests the pair travel to an onshore whaling station farther up the coast, where Fox might sell a pair of newfangled American harpoons he won in a card game in Sydney.

These harpoons are absurd encumbrances for the son of a baronet whose most cited reading material is a manual for polite drawing room conversation.

None of this is what our narrator set out to do. He crossed the globe at the request of an imposing older woman, Mrs Prendergast, a rich neighbour of his parents. She enlisted his aid to track down a convict named Maryanne Maginn, transported as a mid-teen to Van Diemen’s Land decades before.

A Treacherous Country by KM Kruimink

Mrs Prendergast is no particular fan of Fox. But she is aware that he has made an offer of marriage to Charlotte, her attractive young ward, and that this offer has been refused. The successful execution of this task, insinuates the older woman, might shift the needle of her regard.

The ease with which Fox has been distracted in his mission says something about his personality. He is too far from home to maintain the urgency of his undertaking. The gravity of class and social expectation has grown thin; the gallantry of his gesture has faded with distance.

He is too adrift and alone — too unmoored by the oddity of antipodean people and place — to do more than acquiesce to the urges of more powerful personalities along the way.

So far, at least, Katherine Kruimink’s A Treacherous Country, winner of The Australian-Vogel’s Literary Award, sounds like a regulation historical novel of the kind in which Tasmanian authors excel.

It is nothing of the sort. A Treacherous Country is closer to Franz Kafka than Marcus Clarke. It’s a parable wrapped in a melodrama, a metaphysical fugue disguised as a tale of adventure, the kind where the questing individual is checked at every move by blind, implacable forces and where other people’s motivations remain opaque.

The result is not surreal, though: more a different kind of real­ism. This is how colonies look to a mind formed in the imperial centre: mad, rude, unreadable, run according to a private logic. Sitting in a roadside public house, dispatching a rabbit pie he has been warned against consuming (“it ain’t rabbit,” warns the urchin who tends his horse), he considers the locals:

There was some undercurrent of meaning in that place that I was unable to fathom. There seemed a mode of being that everybody, perhaps from so high as the Lieutenant-Governor to so low as the lowliest thrall, understood. Everybody but I!

Fox’s situation provokes disquiet at such moments, yet there is also plenty of sly humour to be wrung from his halting odyssey. The horse he rides was bought (on the Cannibal’s advice) at dawn from a German in a dark city alley. Within hours, rain has washed the boot polish from its coat, revealing a creature significantly less youthful and sleek than advertised.

Later the same horse, which turns out be stolen, is stolen back from Fox by a highwayman, soon after he has been attacked from within by the after effects of ain’t-rabbit pie.

By the time he stumbles into the whaling station, hours behind the Cannibal, from whom he’d become separated, Fox has been stripped of his possessions and money.

At which point Kruimink’s narrative, which so far has deftly balanced slapstick misadventure and foreboding, takes a serious turn. The oddball cast of whalers and emigres who have been shipwrecked by circumstance at the station welcome Fox as a potential saviour. Surely the young man of means intends to purchase the place, a godforsaken set-up fallen into rust and ruin following a precipitous decline in whale numbers. No demurral on Fox’s part shakes this happy collective certainty — only a whale sighting close to shore. And with that, the narrative sets out to sea and a set-piece hunt of real elegance and force:

The whale drifted. The huge unknowable of the idle movements. Heron shouted for us to heave and we did. I was compelled to turn away from Jack and bend over my oar as the future sprang into two, and then each of those two sprang into two, and on, until what would occur was a great tangled mess of possibility. “There it is!” I heard Jack shout behind me.

“The air had gone from thick to thin, though still white with fog.”

Fox continues, “There was no coastline and no station, out there in the fog, for everything in the world had collapsed. The spectre of Maryanne Maginn fizzed and died like a candle-flame between wet fingertips.”

What follows is one of those experiences that divide a life, the result of which will colour the remainder of the story.

Admirable as the language of the novel is, striking sparks from the clash of Victorian circumlocution and blunt Vandemonian demotic — and acute as the insights that are afforded to Fox by his creator may be — there are moments when the shifting of registers reveals a confusion of purposes.

A Treacherous Country is too long to be a short story and too short for a novel. It is too melancholy to be a straight comedy and too abrupt in narrative terms to work as a bildungsroman. What remains, however, is a narrative whose ramshackle quality only adds to the charm and eccentric joy of the whole. As intelligent lockdown escapism, A Treacherous Country has perfect pitch.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

A Treacherous Country

By Kate Kruimink

Allen & Unwin, 256pp, $29.99