Book review: Sarah Thornhill

It marks the completion of her Colonial Trilogy, which included The Lieutenant, set in 1788, in the earliest days of the penal settlement of Australia. In the wake of The Secret River, Grenville was roundly attacked by a handful of blinkered historians who accused her of calling it “history”. Were they jealous of her sales, of her way with words? Was “get off our patch” what they were saying?

But Grenville’s novels are all about footprints rather than footnotes. She is interested in the legacy of history, how we deal with the rattling bones, the dirty laundry. Her books are not histories in themselves, nor has she claimed them to be. They are fiction, just like the crazy accusations levelled against her.

Undeterred, she remains a sucker for the past, and Sarah Thornhill displays her gift for creating character full blaze. It’s a great work of truth, as The Secret River was, inspired by her own family’s past, on the Hawksbury’s banks, 50 miles north of Sydney.

William Thornhill bestrides both novels. For those who have read The Secret River, and know Thornhill’s hand in the terrible slaughter of Aborigines at the climax of the book, this is a sequel laden with incubating suspense. For readers new to the Thornhill saga – as is Sarah, its narrator – what unfolds is a box of surprises, richly wrapped in language so colourful and lively, you can taste it.

Sarah’s voice is the key to the book. You believe in her honesty, her perceptiveness, her way of “reading” others. She is illiterate, yet her sensibility sings, which is why her words are often poetic, nothing to do with education, but all to do with soul and gut instinct and with her love of nature’s sensuousness.

“The Hawksbury was a lovely river, wide and calm, the water dimply green, the cliffs golden in the sun, and white birds roosting in the trees like so much washing” is how she begins. And she gets better, describing the family’s convolutions: Ma, the stepmother, all airs and graces, William Thornhill, so enigmatic, now well established with his 300 acres of booty, a grand stone house, and men at his call, far from his former convict self.

The brothers, three of them, and Sarah’s sister Mary, all hove, fluttering into view, part of the chittering life of the house; her brother Will’s buddy, handsome Jack Langland, half- Aborigine, grabs her heart, as she grabs his.

The Hawksbury River is Sarah’s Arcadia, a landscape of opportunities with “no past”. But secrets fester. Sarah discovers she has another brother, “sent away” her father says. She vows to find him. To find out why. Will, too, has secrets. He drowns at sea, on a seal-hunting voyage. Jack, the survivor, returns with a Maori child, Will’s daughter, purloined from her family in New Zealand. Her presence, along with the absence of Sarah’s missing brother, proves a crux of what will tragically come to pass.

Events are triggered by Jack and Sarah’s decision to marry, a shock to the Thornhills. Ma, playing dirty, tells Jack in private what old man Thornhill did to the “blacks”. To Jack it’s unthinkable to yolk himself to such kin. Without a word, and to Sarah’s amazement, he absconds. “A vomit of cries and tears ripped out of me in long bleeding wails I had no power to stop,” she says. She is young, with much to discover – both about deviousness and love.

She describes how later, matched to an Irishman, she marries and has a daughter. They live in the bush, far from the Hawksbury, and she dies a little, remakes herself, is visited, as we knew she would be, by the past. Jack’s reappearance comes with a mission; he asks for her help, a task that will take her to New Zealand and which on the way will bring her face to face with her missing brother, Dick, and with the dark truth of her father’s atrocity.

Disappointment comes with what’s missing. The failure of Jack and Sarah to reconcile the past. The failure of Sarah to deal directly with her father over his crimes. These are scenes Kate Grenville must surely have imagined. Perhaps she wishes us, too, to imagine them, thereby making the story our own. But I can’t help thinking that her version – Sarah’s version – would have been better, and would have made an already wonderful novel, great.

• Sarah Thornhill

by Kate Grenville

Canongate, 307pp, £12.99