Journey to the other side of the world and into the self

How came I to a place like this?

What spirit drew me here?

These two questions, posed by Gabriel Fox, protagonist and narrator, open K. M. Kruimink's Vogel-winning novel A Treacherous Country. Set in Van Diemen's Land, the novel follows Gabriel's quest to find one Maryanne Maginn, a now middle-aged woman transported to the colony thirty years earlier. Bankrolled by Mrs. Prendergast, a family neighbor in rural England, Gabriel sees a successful search as essential to achieving his inmost desire, marriage to Susannah, Mrs. Prendergast's young ward. In outline, the novel follows a fairy-tale pattern. A young man desires to wed the princess, but he must first prove himself worthy of her. The princess's keepers—the king? the queen?—set him a daunting task, the fulfillment of which means winning the princess's hand. Travel to the Antipodes is in itself daunting; traversing the Vandemonian wilds on a goose chase is trebly so. To keep himself heartened and focused, Gabriel wears a cameo of his beloved to spur him forward through this strange land.

Gabriel Fox, however, is no fairy-tale hero but the third son of a provincial squire. His birth order offers him few prospects, and Gabriel, as we come to know him amid his trekking and reflecting, is a young dolt waiting vaguely for opportunity to find him. He responds to Mrs. Prendergast's summons at the insistence of his tyrannizing father, who sees a potential for his son and himself in the meeting, thanks to the lady's considerable wealth. Incurious lad that Gabriel is, he accepts at face value Mrs. Prendergast's proposal that he deliver a letter to a Miss Maginn on the other side of the world. Witness to a recent scene in which Lord Fox brutalized Gabriel's mother in the midst of a Yuletide party, Mrs. Prendergast states, "Lady Fox's . . . pure and simple expression of Unhappiness . . . did flare a little light on the circumstances of my own heart" (190). Gabriel, having lived his life in a comedy-of-manners environment, is perplexed by her disclosure: "Was Mrs Prendergast confessing that she was Unhappy. The prospect seemed so unlikely it was almost comical" (190).

Yet Gabriel is the comical one. On his own for the first time ever, as he tramps or rides through Van Diemen's Land, Gabriel bumbles and stumbles. His chief life guide to date has been a book given him by his mother, Dainty Conversation for the Drawing Room: A Guide for Young Ladies and Gentlemen. Adrift in the bush, Gabriel finds the Guide useless. He encounters swindlers, card sharps, whalers, prostitutes, and cannibals. When the companion he has labeled "My Cannibal" reveals himself as an Irishman, Gabriel finds proximity to a papist scarcely less settling than exposure to a real consumer of human flesh. Set free from usual constraints, Gabriel buys "an ugly . . . but also stupid horse" for too much money (4), wins a couple of harpoons in a card game (contrary to his card fellows' assertions, there is no local sale value for harpoons), and deflects the attention of a prostitute in a pub, grateful for the "morsel of attention" (8) she pays him. Conceding "I am quite easily led," he remains determined to stay "loyal to my dear Susannah . . . and . . . be worthy of her" (8).

Kruimink's exploration of colonial Van Diemen's Land is at once hilarious, invigorating, and moving. An encounter with the supervisor of a chain gang provides one instance of humor. Gabriel, trying to extricate himself from the conversation, responds to an insult with a bold—for him—"How dare you" (51). He then upbraids himself privately, as his Guide has asserted that there were "four purposes of talk amongst people" (51), and his outburst has failed in all cases. Indeed, much of the entertainment comes through Gabriel efforts to apply facets of the Guide to a world with no drawing rooms and without people or situations that...