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Loading... English Passengersby Matthew Kneale
A good read; interesting historical background, amusing tale, not over-long and well put together. The story is told from the point of view of different characters and perspectives, which the author uses to his comic advantage, showing different viewpoints on the same scene and circumstances. An excellent novel. (  ) Tifi | Dec 6, 2009 |  One of the most enjoyable novels I've read in years. My wife loved it too. The best thing Kneale has written so far. I probably would have dig back to "A Confederacy of Dunces" to find a book that I laughed out loud at so much. (  ) nog | Aug 24, 2009 | A tour de force. A multi-layered story set in the 1800's that moves around the globe and then focuses on Tasmania in the early days of British settlement. The arrival of settlers and British government had a disastrous impact on the Indigenous people. Other themes include the clash between science and religion, the management of penal colonies, theories about racial characteristics and superiority, and the exploration and development of new territories by the British. The story is told in the first person by more than twenty characters, each with their own distinctive voice. A great achievement. Most of these characters are misguided fools who plow on, oblivious to reality, and ultimately pay the price for their folly. The only one with a resonable grasp of what's happening is Peevay, the young Aboriginal boy. It was such a surprise to find a Manx writer had come across this small but shameful part of Australian history and decided to bring it out into the light. The other surprise is that Kneale has managed to tackle a very serious issue with a great deal of humour. The first half of the novel has a rollicking quality, with many laugh out loud scenes, but as the story progresses there's no escaping the message that the early settlers basically eradicated the Aboriginal population of Tasmania. (  )1  RobinDawson | Jun 13, 2009 | Brilliant! ( ) aquascum | May 7, 2009 | This is a very fine piece of historical fiction. Set in the mid nineteenth century (1829 to about 1870). The main focus is Tasmania, it's indigenous culture and population, and the Europeans that decimate them. The plot is told in alternating voices -- an aboriginal man, a Manx ship captain, and his passengers -- an English vicar who is leading an expedition to find the biblical Garden of Eden, the expedition's doctor, and its botanist. Told in a clear series of voices, this is a tour-de-force look at the British at the height of their imperial mind-sets. A gem of a book! atelier | Feb 2, 2009 | A 5 star read. One of the most enjoyable works of fiction I have ever read. I wish I could write like this. ( ) miss.whiskers | Nov 30, 2008 | What is it anyway? I've never read a bad book set in Tasmania. There's the wondrous Gould's Book of Fish. There's another novel that I read a few years ago that I can't for the life of me remember the name of. That one and Kneale's English Passengers both cover some of the same ground - the destruction of the aboriginal people of the island. The history itself is compelling. Kneale's historical novel (a Booker short lister in 2000, the Atwood Blind Assassin year) has a quirky cast of characters that cross all ethnicities - and form a major part of this tale. There're the Manxmen, from the small island subsumed by the British Empire. There are the convicts, trappers, and settlers of Tasmania (the white scut). There are the dwindling aboriginal tribes of Tasmania. And finally, there are the English passengers themselves, who form a broad range of types and personalities just amongst themselves. One of this group is Dr. Potter, a London surgeon who is collecting specimens of ethnic types and writing his own precursor to Mein Kampf. Another of the English passengers is a small time vicar who has visions of finding the Garden of Eden, that he decides must be located in Tasmania. Hence he, the vicar, and a wastrel geologist become the passengers of the title, who hire out the vessel of a group of Isle of Manx smugglers for the trek to discover paradise on earth. This voyage, along with the story of the extermination of the aboriginal peoples of Tasmania (Van Diemen's land) form the narrative as told through short chapters in first person of the various players in a sort of diary like format. The myriad and diverse perspectives are one of the delights of the book. There's the chronicle of Peavey, told in a pidgin English that swells with rage and deflates with despair as his people are killed off by policy, by disease, and by "progress". There are the various government officials and even the 'liberal' bleeding heart do gooder (who, at the end of the day, is as destructive as the murderous settlers) who profess that they have nothing but the best interest of the poor "savages" in mind. One can't help but note the racist seeds of 19th Century imperialism have taken root and mutated into other, more subtle forms of social hegemony that are still with us today. (  ) ChazzW | Sep 19, 2008 | A fantastic history lesson and novel rolled into one, told in a remarkable twenty distinct voices. If you liked Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible you will enjoy this. ( ) PGAllison | May 27, 2008 | A rollicking account of a chaotic expedition to Tasmania, to find the original garden of Eden. A heartbreaking account of the more or less deliberate extermination of a race, but more or less well-meaning people. A fabulous babel of different voices telling of many obsessions and one story. Just fab. ( ) ElizabethPisani | Apr 19, 2008 | The author manages to write a humorous novel about horrible genocide. The depictions of the enslavement and demise of the Tasmanian natives is brutal and tragic. The author saves his humor for the descriptions of the English passengers who come to the island to set up their own Garden of Eden. ( ) shihtzu | Mar 24, 2008 | Waiting till I finish it...if ever - so far slipshod research into ships (why go aloft to let go the sheets? Sheets are lines attached to the corners of the sail and are led down to the deck, landlubbers often confuse sheets and sails, I've sailed in square rig and I know) ; since when does a sea breeze blow away from the land, I'm not trying to be petty, these little errors compound the unconvincingness...how could a wombat climb a companionway ladder on its stumpy legs... Well I finally finished it. Funny? not to me. Clever? no - full of silly little errors of fact that undermine it. Every English voice is full of self righteouss pompousness and it becomes very annoying- I realise this is a technique of characterisation (having each character speak in their own voice) but the cliches and platitudes are exceptionally tedious! (Hence the need for a third person narrator). ... and what was it about - it seemed to be at war with itself, am I a comic romp about an inept Manx smuggler and a dotty Englich cleric or a dark tale about the evils of racial psuedo science and the fate of the Tasmanian aboriginals. I don't have a full O.E.D. either but I suspect as well as sailing errors we have a great deal of anachronistic speech... I think the book fell into it's own trap - every English character thinks they know best about the "poor blacks" and the author thinks he knows best about the attitudes he satirises. For all these reasons for me it failed utterly. How could it win a Whitbread? Fashion for noble savages and idiot Europeans? (  ) Figgles | Feb 19, 2008 | Missing Links or Chains? We are in Tasmania, once Van Deiman's Land, in search of Paradise; amongst the prisoners in the British run proto-concentration camps; with the aborigines facing extinction at the hands of `the British'; and on a boat of `unfortunate' Manx smugglers constantly running from customs officers. The scope is both very tight on two `small' islands off the coast of major parts of the Great British Empire, and world spanning in the vast expanses of the British Ruled Waves between. I wouldn't know the factual accuracy of everything in the novel, but it is certainly one of those fictions that contain a truth about both the good and the bad in human nature. It is a book of contrasts, where you cannot remove one `side' without making the other invisible. The Reverend Wilson, in a reaction to the new study of Geology's findings about the age of the earth is in search of a physical, only 5,000 year old Paradise; on the same trip is Dr Potter, secretive scientific in the new sense, and looking for evidence of the inheritable superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. Both wish to become famous as a result of the publications they will base on their journey across the world. Put against this high energy double-extreme is the third member of the expedition, Timothy Renshaw; a disappointment to his family and on the boat officially as botanist, but really in search for a meaning to his life - or so his family hope: A more laid-back, late adolescent you could not wish for. I can't help being reminded of the voyage of the Beagle, of Darwin and Fitzroy. But it is only a reminder - Matthew Kneale has resisted the temptation to base his characterisation on them but seems to have taken the issues which arise from that real, paradigm-shattering voyage and personified them. That this works so well is mainly due to the stunning `voice' he gives to each of his characters. The Manx captain and crew don't only have a superficial sprinkling of Manx words, they seem to think Manx - and a whole culture linked and contrasting with the dominant English emerges in those parts told by Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley (and Kneale should have won the Booker Prize on the strength of that name alone!). The tour-de-force though is Peevay. With a Tasmanian mother abducted to be a sex-slave by an escaped convict father, Peevay journeys through the book searching for love and identity. The only certainty he has is his ability to endure. He tells his story in a language which stretches English to its limits. It isn't the usual `poetic' limit, or `stream-of-consciousness' limit; it is a twisted grammar and not-quite-right-vocabulary of a none-native speaker struggling to express complex thoughts and emotions limit; it is a way of thinking about the world in another culture limit; it's a limit which pulls you screaming and kicking into a strange world and consciousness of `other' experience. It is a language that makes you regret that part of your ancestry which was responsible for the Genocide on Van Deiman's Land. I don't think I give too much away if I say Peevay does achieve a sort of resolution, nor if I say there is an ending which leaves one hopeful. This is a book which you won't forget in a long time, and which treats the 19th century as what it was - the foundation of much of what we think and do at the start of the 21st Century. Well worth reading! ( ) akfarrar | Nov 23, 2007 | 4192 English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale (read 23 July 2006) (Whitbread Book of the Year for 2000) is the 6th Whitbread Book of the Year I've read, the others being 2658 The Old Jest, by Jennifer Johnston (read 5 Oct 1994) (Whitbread Book of the Year for 1979) 3876 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon (read 12 Apr 2004) (Whitbread Book of the Year for 2003) 4035 Samuel Pepys The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (read 12 June 2005) (Whitbread Book of the Year for 2002) 4147 Small Island, by Andrea Levy (read 4 Apr 2006) (Whitbread Book of the Year for 2004) 4148 Beowulf A New Verse Translation Seamus Heaney (read 5 Apr 2006) (Whitbread Book of the Year for 1999) I did not like this story for a while but as time went on I came to enjoy it. An English minister in the 19th century decides Tasmania was the site of the Garden of Eden and undertakes an expedition there in 1857, chartering a ship captained by an Isle of Man native. In Tasmania the group come in contact with aborigines, who were much mistreated earlier and still were being mistreated in the 1850s. The novel is told by various characters and some narrators are less interesting and less funny than others. Reverend Wilson, the guy who is sure Eden can be found in the wilds of Tasmania, is really funny in his accounts and I laughed aloud numerous times, though the humor is irreverent I suppose. On balance this is a very enjoyable book and rewarding to one who is not discouraged by the less interesting parts. I am indeed glad I read it. ( ) Schmerguls | Oct 23, 2007 | A comic and touching story of racial extinction, religious fervour, and honest-to-goodness smuggling. I raced through this one and loved every page. ( ) Clurb | Jul 10, 2007 | The vicar is looking for the Garden of Eden in Tasmania. The aborigines are being killed off by the white settlers. Surprisingly, for the content this is a comic novel. I finished it because it was on the Radio 4 Reading Club but it wasn’t really my cup of tea although it was quite a good book. ( ) aapjebaapje | Feb 26, 2007 | A Whitbread Book of the year (20000 - always a good sign. Beautifully written. A sharp, humorous, compassionate fictional portrayal of the destruction of the aboriginal peoples of Tasmania at the hands of British settlers (and their diseases) in the 19th Century. ( ) miketroll | Feb 22, 2007 | tamaranth | Dec 27, 2006 |   EricaKline | Nov 21, 2006 | I saved a copy of Matthew Kneale's English Passengers from bargain-cart purgatory at the shop last week and brought it home with me to read as one of my "T-books" (that is, paperbacks, generally fiction, that accompany me on my jaunts about Boston). Typically I try and keep those in my bag when I'm at home so I'm not tempted to read them except when traveling - with this book, however, I quickly gave up that charade and succumbed to its siren's song. Kneale has created something little short of a masterpiece with this work. His method of structure is superb (telling the story from many different first-person perspectives, each with their own unique voice), and his knack for language is simply brilliant. The development of each character is handled with a deftness for which I can think of no apt comparison. From Manx captain Illiam Quillian Kewley of the Sincerity to the Tasmanian aborigine Peevay to the deluded vicar Geoffrey Wilson and the twisted Dr. Thomas Potter, Kneale brings so much life to his pages that it is nearly impossible to feel for the characters (whether that feeling be respect, hatred or compassion) as the narrative proceeds. This book was a finalist for the Booker Prize and has won several other awards, all well deserved. It is a fantastic yarn from stem to stern, filled with tension, humor, and all the ironies of human interaction. I cannot recommend it more highly. http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2006/... ( ) jbd1 | Jul 3, 2006 | Kneale wrote this book in about 20 different voices. All unique and fascinating to read. The book succeeds on several levels. It's great historical adventure fiction, it's a study of prejudice disguised as academia, and it's literary enough that the English teacher in our book club is adding it to her high school reading lists. I recommend this one. ( ) jennyo | Mar 24, 2006 | not read pomgirl | Jan 2, 2006 | |
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