Three mid-Victorian gentlemen have chartered a ship crewed by Manxmen with the purpose of sailing to Tasmania. There are various voices – fifteen or more – but a small handful of crucial ones power the story. This is an instance of what is called the multi-voice novel – in spades. To compensate for that, English Passengers is a masterpiece, an achievement of such complexity, ingenuity and sheer narrative power that each time I reread it I am newly surprised: how can a writer have thus conjured up the wildly conflicting attitudes of another time, another place, with such persuasive force? The book was a prize-winner when it was published in 2000 but I feel it may be undeservedly overlooked today, perhaps because Matthew Kneale is a costive writer, with only a couple of other novels appearing since. Farrell and John Fowles, who redeem the genre for me. Now, I have a resistance to the historical novel, but this writer is one of those, along with J.
Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) has to be called a historical novel it is set in 1857.
0 kommentar(er)
