Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 2000 and a selection on the short list for the Booker Prize, English Passengers uses multiple narrators and textual devices to tell the 19th-century story of a voyage to Tasmania.
The novel opens in 1857 with the first-person narrator Illiam Quillian Kewley, a Manx seafarer and captain of the Sincerity, an ingeniously double-hulled ship designed to facilitate the customary Manxman’s anti-English indulgence in smuggling. When he runs afoul of the authorities, Kewley must turn to the lowly pursuit of taking on paying passengers. Still bearing his hidden contraband cargo of brandy and tobacco, he reluctantly acquires as passengers the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson and his party; Rev. Wilson is traveling to Tasmania to search for the Garden of Eden — which he firmly believes is sequestered there in Van Dieman’s land — and to prove his theory of “divine refrigeration,” a rebuttal of Darwin’s distasteful claims.
The narrative shifts to Rev. Wilson through his letters and tracts, and from him to various members of his party, including his sponsor, the dimwitted but wealthy Jonah Childs, an untalented botanist (a kind of anti-Darwin) named Timothy Renshaw, and a surgeon with an evil and racist agenda, Dr. Thomas Potter. These men are virtual strangers to one another, and they quickly discover they have very little shared common ground or mutual sympathy, and enmities soon fester. Various members of the party pass time during the long hours of the voyage making attempts to proselytize Capt. Kewley’s crew to accept their own particular theory of how nature works.
The narrative then moves to a Tasmanian voice and rolls back 20 years to chronicle the fate of the native people of Tasmania. This narrator, Peevay, is the child of a Tasmanian mother and a white father (a seal hunter) who kidnapped and raped her. As an observer of the fate of the Tasmanians, Peevay is torn between the longing for his white father to rescue him from his mother’s bitterness against the whiteness in him and the revulsion he feels for the cruelty with which whites dispossessed the Tasmanians of their land.
Kneale is drawing on historical records of one of the brutal episodes of colonialism, thinly fictionalizing the historical persons who carried out the extermination of the Tasmanian natives under the guise of protecting them. Capt. Kewley delivers Rev. Wilson and his party into the aftermath of this small holocaust; contacts with colonials on the island confirm the story Peevay related. In the name of religion and civilization, and with no particular intention to perpetrate genocide, British settlers wiped the entire native population of Tasmania off the face of the earth.
Kneale’s novel satirizes the arrogant self-righteousness of the colonial enterprise by allowing many narrators to damn themselves with their own words. The novel is a virtuoso display of skill with tone and voice; Kneale uses some 20 narrators, but he structures their discourse in such a way that his plot stays on course. His command of characterization is impressive: he does not explain and interpret characters by narration, description, and exposition but instead allows characters to reveal themselves through their interests, writings, and conversations. To do so, he displays his command of a wide range of authentic dialects and accents (the book even comes equipped with a glossary to help readers comprehend the obscure, specific, and archaic terms). English Passengers is an engaging story filled with lively characters, some of whom are despicable, but all of whom are believable. Its merit deserves a wider recognition than its prize-winning status has garnered for it.
Bibliography
Conrad, P. Behind the Mountain: Return to Tasmania. New York: Poseidon Press, 1989.
Hines, Derek. “Eden and Empire.” Review of English Passengers. Times Literary Supplement, 24 March 2000: 24.
Robson, Lloyd. A Short History of Tasmania. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
Slave Narrative 
Analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier 
Analysis of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour 
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
You must be logged in to post a comment.