The Lieutenant
Kate Grenville
The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, 2008, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2009
Isn’t it funny? Only last week I was, after a fashion, extolling the virtues of Rule Britannia, at least as a piece of music, and now I am confronted by a different view, and a different perspective.
A friend of mine lent me this book on Friday, saying – and I don’t think he is prone to hyperbole – that by the time he had reached page 8, he was convinced it was a work of genius. Well! How could my curiosity not be aroused?
I was certainly hooked by page 8, and I’d gobbled up the book’s 300 odd pages by Saturday. I’m not sure that I would ascribe to it the “G” word, but it certainly made for compulsive reading. It is a fictionalised account of the career of a British naval officer towards the end of the eighteenth century. We read first of his childhood in Portsmouth. He is somewhat solitary, socially awkward, and highly intelligent. I suppose nowadays he would be called “neurodiverse”, occupying some rung on the ladder of some spectrum or other. He is fascinated by prime numbers, and with astronomy, the celestial clockwork as divined by Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton. He also has a talent for languages.
At first his teachers think he is merely odd, but then his talents are recognised, and he is enlisted in the British Navy, largely thanks to his ability to navigate. He really has no interest in the Royal Navy, but recognises a career opportunity, that will take him to the West Indies, and later to New South Wales, in pursuit of the sighting of a comet.
He learns, early on, that the modus operandi of the British Empire is one of cruelty. He witnesses a hanging, and later, a merciless flogging. He understands the extreme danger of insubordination, and he despises his own tacit acceptance of the way things are, while witnessing the administration of punishment.
In New South Wales, he discovers his métier. He will learn, and record, the local Aboriginal language. He does this by forging a friendship with a young girl whom he recognises as being, like himself, highly intelligent. They exchange vocabulary, and gradually he begins to deduce declension, conjugation, the rules of a grammar and syntax. Simultaneously, and inevitably, he absorbs a culture. You might say he is an anthropologist who “goes native”. He understands the danger of letting this be known to his fellow officers. If he can, he must keep it to himself.
Of course, it becomes impossible. He cannot continue to be part of a system, a machine that inflicts cruelty. Sooner or later he must choose a side.
50 years later, as an old man, he is back in the West Indies, in Antigua, where he discovers the next phase of his life’s work. He makes it his business to buy slaves, in order that he may set them free.
The life experience of the lieutenant strongly reminded me of that of the young George Orwell, who was a policeman in Burma and who woke up to the harsh realities of Imperial might. Empire, he came to realise, is all about making money, accruing wealth from all corners of the globe. His essay, A Hanging, particularly comes to mind.
I guess New South Wales has changed a lot. I well remember the thrill at my first sight from the air of Sydney Harbour, the Harbour Bridge, and the Opera House. Yet in other ways it remains the same. We cannot escape history. I was on my way to Brisbane, in Queensland, to work for a locum agency, and I soon discovered that the first peoples were completely invisible. I travelled to Alice Springs, in the Hot Red Centre. Here, the white man strolled along the highway, while, in parallel, a stone’s throw away, the black fella sat on the dry Todd river bed. And there was on interaction. I hired a car and drove down to Uluru, and something of interest happened both on the way down and on the way back. About 30 miles from Ayers Rock my fan belt broke and the engine started to overheat. I stopped to let it cool down, then drove on a few miles, stopped, cooled down, started up again, stopped… Thus I limped into Ayers Rock. The whole way, I never saw a soul. If it had happened 100 miles up the road, I might have been in trouble. No mobile phones. Strange things happen in the outback. People just disappear. You hear weird tales of backpackers who just vanish, of children snatched by dingoes. Picnic at Hanging Rock.
And on the way back, about thirty miles from Alice, I came across a car crash, where a group of first peoples were seeking help. I was with a doctor from New York and she wanted to keep going, but the least I could do was to take one of the party into Alice, which I did. I think Kate Grenville’s lieutenant would have done more.
jamescalumcampbell 