The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

       This month the McBride Library Book Club theme was Australian authors.  I chose The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville.

                This novel follows the life of Daniel Rooke, beginning on his fifth birthday in 1767 in Plymouth, England.  Even as a small child Rooke had extraordinary mathematical abilities which luckily were recognized and fostered. He was sent to an elite school; one generally just attended by children of the privileged classes, and there he was introduced and nurtured by a leading astronomer of the day along with his formal educated. 

      Once his schooling was over he failed to get one of the few available jobs as a scientist or astronomer, because those were rare and reserved for the privileged class.  He did however join the Navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant while serving in the war against the American colonies.  Returning back to England after the war, he finally got a dream job as the astronomer on the first voyage to take prisoners to Australia.

      After a nine month voyage to the opposite side of the world, he finally landed in the totally unique land of Australia, with its strange varieties of flora and fauna, and aboriginal people, who shunned the white strangers.  As the rest of the crew oversaw the prisoners as they worked clearing the land for the penal colony, Rooke was able to work independently to set up his observatory on a high bluff by the sea above the camp. 

      While loving his independence, he was also fascinated by the governor's attempt to capture a couple of Aborigines in hopes that they could learn their language and teach them English so they could communicate.

       The reason Rooke was sent to Australia as an astronomer was to view the predicated return of Halley's Comet that was supposed to reappear.  Rooke became terribly frustrated when that appearance failed to materialize, but he soon put his intellect to the job of learning the incomprehensible language of the small group of Aborigines, who had begun to periodically visit his observatory.  Cracking the language started to become the focus of his life.  

       Among the small group of local Aborigines was a young girl who seems to be as interested in English as Rooke was of her language.  It was through her that Rooke began  to make headway in understanding the language and their culture.  He began to see how cruel and violent his own British culture was in comparison, and he began to become  conflicted in his role as a British soldier and his job as a scientist and fellow human being, co-existing with a different culture. 

       After a brutish prisoner, who has been appointed hunter for the pineal colony, returned to the colony with an Aborigines spear embedded in his side, Rooke and 30 other military men are sent out to capture the killer and six other natives for punishment.  If the capture failed, the sailors were to bring 6 severed heads of the natives.  This order appalled Rooke and he refused to be a part of it and as a result he was subsequently sent back to England for a court martial, thus leaving the land and people he had begun to love. 

      As I read, I kept waiting for more information about why he never saw Halley's Comet, but was never given an explanation.  I was surprised by the turn of direction in the novel from Rooke being an astronomer and then suddenly he was a researcher of Aboriginal language and culture.  Later I read in the Afterward that the novel was based on the life of a real British astronomer, and his life had taken this unexpected turn.  I found the ending weak, and unsatisfying largely I guess because it was firmly based on a real life and and the novel seemed not to vary from that story.

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