Book 248: St Helena, Ascension & Tristan da Cunha (English) – Napoleon’s Last Island (Thomas KENEALLY)

The night before the arrival was warm and moonlit and unkind to those who sought sleep, given that the crowds of constellations seemed to pause above us, as if to herald the most exceptional day that was coming, its dread and wonder and melancholy. We were awakened the next morning by the usual ragged fusillade from the guns atop Ladder Hill. Sound sleepers could remain unconscious through this dawn thunder, but none of us had been sound sleepers that night. We rode down to the town the next morning, hastening on the way, me ahead at what my mother considered an unwise canter. The island and the town and the familiar hills seemed new, as if a certain pulse of the earth had created them afresh… 

When we got there, the town appeared struck by a kind of dread. A squadron of newly arrived ships crowded the water. The question was, how could that massive advent be contained in Jamestown’s narrow span?

 

For someone who was responsible for conquering one of the largest continental empires in European history, Napoleon’s life was surprisingly haunted by small islands – Corsica, Elba and St Helena, where he ended his days in exile. (You could perhaps add the not-so-small British Isles which he fatally failed to conquer).

Personally, I’ve always been mystified by the worship of Napoleon. It’s hard to think of anyone else who betrayed more people and ideals during his career: Corsican independence, his fellow consuls, the revolution, equality (declaring himself emperor), the slaves, Haiti, the pope (twice), his own armies after their defeats in Egypt, Syria, and Russia. I’m no military expert, but why is he considered such a genius when he lost all the battles that really mattered? Perhaps he should be praised instead for the less exciting civil reforms, such as the reformed law code.

This book is another place-holder, as I couldn’t find that any novels have been written by the ‘Saints’. So I chose this historical novel by one of Australia’s best writers, Tom Keneally (most famous for Schindler’s Ark, called Schindler’s List in the US and in the Spielberg film) based on an intriguing connection he discovered with Napoleon’s final exile there. In 2012 he visited an exhibition in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne on Napoleon. He was stunned to see that some of the exhibits had come from nearby on Port Phillip Bay and had been brought to Australia by the family of one Betsy Balcome – “intimate friend and annoyer” of Napoleon himself. And therein lies a tale, which Keneally was inspired to spin.

Betsy remembers her family’s arrival on St Helena when she was three (which seems unlikely). Her father works for the East India Company. The rather wild Betsy and her more staid and lovable sister Jane live an idyllic life there. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the major current of world history is dumped onto this exquisitely isolated island, when he is sent to the end of the earth to keep him away from mischief and escape. (Napoleon’s exile to St Helena is a bit reminiscent of how the British transported their unwanted convicts to the much bigger island of Australia.)

When the Emperor arrives on St Helena, he spends the first three months as a guest of the Balcome family, who become his friends, while the ramshackle permanent residence intended for him, Longwood House, is being repaired.

While Napoleon tries to maintain a pretend court there, Betsy refuses to be overawed by him; she keeps her cheeky character, and is continuously baiting him, which he loves – and because of her age, she gets away with it, and can ask him embarrassing questions that no one else could. (For example, he pretends the defeat at Acre didn’t happen, just like Ramses II in the same area thousands of years earlier). Napoleon corrects her homework, and plays blind mans buff and hide-and-seek with her. Privately she calls him alternately OGF (our great friend) and The Ogre. The dynamic between the two is fascinating.

Finally, after a change of governor, the Balcomes are exiled in turn, to Australia, because of their friendship with Bonaparte, who dies shortly afterwards. And the rest is history.

It’s a great example of turning a footnote in history into a fine work.

 

Keneally, Thomas (1935 -), Napoleon’s Last Island, North Sydney, Knopf, 2015, ISBN 978 0 85798 460 9

Book 58: Australia (English) – Voss (Patrick WHITE)

Time to pop in at home on the way to my next exotic destination!
If you asked many Australians who is their country’s best writer, or especially their favourite one, I doubt if many of them would say Patrick White. In fact not so many of them have read him; he has a reputation for being difficult, and there are so many other great Australian writers, who are easier to read to boot! (It seems like Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is the default choice for Australia). But I felt the compulsion to give him a go, and now was my chance.
This classic by Australia’s only Nobel Literature Prize winner is a fictionalised account of the last journey of Ludwig Leichhardt, who mysteriously died on his last audacious expedition trying to cross the continent from east to west. It seems to be a close portrait from what we know; White’s Voss (despite his Norwegian-sounding name) is, like Leichhardt, also a German, a loner, more comfortable in the bush than in society, a good bushman but an equivocal leader (as shown by a mutiny), who tried to maintain good relations with the Aborigines (two of whom travelled with him, and from whose skills he undoubtedly profited).

He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs.

The back story of Voss is his unrequited romance-by-letter with a young Sydney girl, despite his cruelty to her (not least in deserting her for his doomed expedition):
With rough persistence he accused her of the superficiality which she herself suspected. At times she could hear her own voice. She was also afraid of the country which, for lack of any other, she supposed was hers. But this fear, like certain dreams, was something to which she would never have admitted.
I did enjoy Voss, which was a great psychological study of a loner who flees society and a loner who stays at home, and the surprising, tenuous but strong bond between them.
Time to finally get around to reading Cloudstreet!

 

WHITE, Patrick (1912-1990), Voss, Sydney, Vintage, 2012, ISBN 978 1 74275 688 2
(first published 1957)