Minutes April 2008 Book: The Secret River by Kate Grenville

The Secret River

by Kate Grenville

(chosen by Elster)



Elster chose this book on the recommendation of her neighbour. She read it last year and enjoyed it, so decided to choose it for bookclub.

Kate Grenville was born and currently lives in Sydney. She has an Arts degree from Sydney University and worked in the film industry before living in the UK and Europe for several years and starting to write.

She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado in 1980 and when she returned to Australia in 1983 she worked at the Subtitling Unit for SBS Television. Her first book, a collection of stories - Bearded Ladies - was published in 1984, and since then she's published six novels and four books about the writing process (one co-written with Sue Woolfe).

The Secret River has won many prizes, including the Commonwealth Prize for Literature and the Christina Stead Prize. Her other works of fiction have also won state and national awards. The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize. Her most recent book Searching for the Secret River is a memoir about the writing of The Secret River. It tells the story of the research behind the novel.

Kate Grenville's novels have been published in a number of countries, including in translation, and her books about the writing process are used in many creative writing courses.

(general biographical details from Kate Grenville's own website.)

What the publisher says about The Secret River:

In the early nineteenth century William Thornhill is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. He arrives with his wife Sal and their children in a harsh land he cannot understand.

Eight years later, Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury as a free man to claim a hundred acres. Aboriginal people already live on that river and Thornhill will soon have to make the most difficult decision of his life.

Inspired by research into her own family history, Kate Grenville's The Secret River is a tour de force, a powerful and groundbreaking story about life on the frontier.

What we discussed about the book:

• To what extent did we empathise with the main characters?
• How harshly did we judge their actions, particularly the indigenous relations. Were we able to experience the story without viewing it from a 21st century perspective?
• How would we have behaved faced with the same situations as the characters? Could we have coped with frontier life in the way that Sal did?
• In relation to the various examples of mistreatment of the Aboriginal people, what alternative courses of action may have been available to the settlers? Could William have informed authorities about the woman chained up? What would the implications of that course of action have been?
• Did the flaws in William's character make it easier or harder for us to empathise with him?
• The symbolism of the fish carved into the rock above the Thornhill's land. Was the placement of his large permanent house over the fish an attempt to wipe out the memory, or a reminder that no matter what was put on top of it, the land had always been someone else's first?
• Why didn't the settlers learn from the Aborigines with regard to hunting and gathering food? What was the cultural mindset at the time that caused them to dismiss such obvious survival mechanisms as 'savage'?
• The difficulties of communication between two societies that didn't share a language or cultural references. Were there differences in understanding of body language too? What examples were there of attempts to communicate being misinterpreted?
• To what extent the convicts were victims of a rigid British class structure. Did we judge them less harshly than the authorities?
• Was Sal representative of most settler women? Her stoic endurance of fearful and hard conditions made her an admirable character. How did we view the relationship between her and William?
• How did the evocative, descriptive writing style heighten our experience of this book?

Then we were sidetracked into:

• What role does historical fiction play in the representation of history? What responsibility does an historical fiction writer have to get the facts right?
• Is it possible to empathise with a character whose actions you find abhorrent?
• If hypothetical aliens arrived in our world, and we shared no language, cultural references or perhaps even body language, how would we communicate with them? Would our immediate response be one of repelling the invader? Or how would we communicate our welcome? How would we know whether they came in peace?

And in other news, we discussed:

• Mobile phones. Is it possible to get one which just makes and receives calls and has no extra features we don't need?
• Acceptance of cultural and religious rules passed down through generations. Which ones do we follow blindly because we've always done it, which ones do we question?

Ratings:
Initial rating average: 8.4
Initial rating range: 7.5 to 9.5
End of discussion ratings: no change

* Next month, the initial rating will be a silent rating.

Next book: Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale