Tom Keneally tackles Napoleon’s exile on St Helena

Tom Keneally’s new novel sees the 80-year-old novelist visiting Napoleon and his neighbours in exile.

Detail from a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, a man of ‘mercurial contradictions’.

When he wrote Falstaff, last of his 28 operas, Verdi was approaching 80. Tom Keneally’s 31st novel under his own name, Napoleon’s Last Island, appeared at the time of his 80th birthday last month, and it is one of the most enjoyable, high spirited and technically accomplished works of a long career.

As was the case with Schindler’s Ark (1982), the plot of the new novel came to Keneally by chance. In 2012, while doing book publicity in Melbourne, he was given tickets to an exhibition at the National Gallery, a collection, as he writes, “of Napoleon’s garments, uniforms, furniture, china, paintings, snuffboxes, military decorations and memorabilia”. By a circuitous route these came to Australia with the Balcombe family who, having befriended Napoleon on St Helena, “that high mid-Atlantic rock of exile”, would endure and then prosper in an exile of their own in the antipodes.

THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE: Napoleon’s dangerous liaison

On St Helena, the Balcombes live on a property called the Briars, a name in turn transported to the family seat in the Mornington Peninsula, southeast of Melbourne. William Balcombe, rumoured by passing store ship captains to be the bastard son of the Prince Regent, works as a provedore and partner in the island’s agency of the East India Company. In 1815 he learns he is to provision Napoleon and his entourage. Not only that, but until Napoleon’s residence at Longwood is ready, the emperor will stay at a cottage on the Balcombe property.

To tell this story Keneally again chooses a female narrator (as in his previous novel, The Daughters of Mars, 2012), the “awkward and contrarian child” (according to her mother), Betsy Balcombe. Betsy remarks of this dramatic and unexpected shift in her family’s circumstances that “the Briars became part of the furniture of [Napoleon’s] life. But so did we, and that’s the tale.”

Or part of it: the emperor’s friendship with the teenaged Betsy reached the ears of those on both sides of the Atlantic eager for news of him. Keneally imagines the relations of the pair with delicacy and verve. He owns that “I am not myself a person who has ever carried a torch for the Emperor Napoleon”, while conceding he was an “enlightenment man and man of destiny”.

But the novelist in Keneally was gripped by the story. He found materials in Betsy’s journal and in the controversial writings, the “eloquence and palaver”, of Irish surgeon Barry O’Meara, whose account of Napoleon’s last illness is brought back to the Balcombes in England, where they are rusticated in Exmouth. O’Meara also delivers a further indictment of Napoleon’s jailer and tormentor, Sir Hudson Lowe, known to the group in Betsy’s acrid phrase as “Name and Nature”. For his part, Napoleon is OGF — Our Great Friend.

Before his arrival, Betsy has undergone durance of her own at a British boarding school. Precocious, forthright, she is a rebel there and at large, a righteous, disruptive force in the mould of Jane Eyre, one whose mettle is admired and resented. In 1811, aged 10, she has made her escape and returned, “a desert island savage”, to St Helena.

Of the island she thinks, even when circumstances have moved her far away to the vast prison of NSW, that this was “the only place I would choose to be, and from which I have ever afterwards been an exile”. Not least this is because of her sportive companionship with the emperor (a title officially forbidden him by the British authorities) on the island, ‘‘this deepest pocket they could find to put the Universal Demon in’’.

At first appearance “the Ogre” is “a fellow of unremarkable or even diminutive height”, but his smile — thinks Betsy, at once entranced and sceptical — is “fleeting light on darkness, a bird skimming the night”. Betsy discerns his mercurial contradictions, “his vanities, his impulses for showing humanity as well as those for making mischief”.

In particular she believes she is warranted in “making some special claims on the antic regions of the Emperor’s soul”. Yet Napoleon is not always at play. He weighs news of escape plots; oversees the writing of his history; man­ages the fractious French followers who share his exile and rebukes Lowe: “I never heard of you but as a clerk to the Prussian General Blucher, and a briber of German princes.”

Keneally gives us sidelong glances of the emperor, dining off “Sevres plates in which were painted records of his glories”, delighting in “a Leslie pneumatic machine for making ice”, mapping old victories, peering through the window of a cellar where Betsy has been imprisoned by her father for her latest infraction.

All these are filtered through Betsy’s fascination with Napoleon. As her mother says, “he offers you something that you don’t find in being English”. Perhaps she has found the same, for Betsy surprises her semi-naked with the emperor, in company with a nude countess and the priapic O’Meara.

The damage to the child is sharply felt, for all that the episode — like so many in the novel — is one of high farce. Thus another exile (from England, for intemperance), Old Huff, kneels to the emperor as one does to “an incarnation”, duels are threatened, a rival locked in a ship’s privy, amours develop. All these vivid, scenic opportunities Keneally keenly grasps.

In the denouement of Napoleon’s Last Island, the Balcombes are in Devon, “haven or retreat or place of detention”, where Sir Hudson Lowe — who, in St Helena, had “poisoned the earth with his tread” — arrives with a threat wrapped in a bribe. William Balcombe, suspected of smuggling money bills for Napoleon, accepts: “he wished to regain substance”. Now the family, including Betsy (who is married and abandoned with a daughter), crosses the world to “that great coastline of yellow rocks and surf”. Keneally briefly sketches one of those stories that he has told often before (one lived out in his own family history) of translation and resettlement, for good and ill, in the antipodes. This is the coda to the intimate glimpse of high political drama entwined with domestic play that this subtle and festive novel has afforded.

Peter Pierce edited the Cambridge History of Australian Literature.

Napoleon’s Last Island

By Tom Keneally

Vintage, 426pp, $32.95