- The Exiles, by Christina Baker Kline. Fiction. Allen & Unwin. $27.99.
It is London 1840 and Evangeline is hired as governess for the two Whitstone children.
The well-educated but naive daughter of a clergyman, she is easy bait for one of the men in the household.
She is accused of stealing a piece of jewellery and of attempted murder after pushing one of the other women in the household downstairs.
Confined to Newgate Prison and with no one to defend her, she faces the local Sessions in chains and is sentenced to 14 years in Van Diemen's Land.
Evangeline's sufferings are spelled out in unforgiving detail, the filth and degradation and the assumption that she is the same as all the other women packed into Newgate.
It gets no better when she is loaded on the Medea for transport to Australia, easy target for a ship's crew, some of them reformed convicts.
The journey is long, tedious and often frightening, made all the more difficult by her pregnancy, now nearing its completion.
As a reader, you look forward to her landing in Australia and being able to find a life for herself, after earning her ticket of leave.
There have been a few chapters intermingled with Evangeline's sufferings dealing with a nine-year old Aboriginal girl named Mathinna who is adopted by Lady Franklin, wife of the governor of Tasmania.
As a reader, you feel that the story may involve some connection between Evangeline, her newborn and this young Aborigine.
The Exiles needs to be read as a searing account of the travails of women in 1840's England.
Wrong.
With less than half the book remaining, we learn that Evangeline, whom we simple readers have imagined as the central character in the novel, is killed by one of the sailors on the ship.
The writing has been so vivid, the accounts of hardship so convincing that it requires an effort to take the story seriously from here.
One of the transportees, a minor character to this stage, now becomes the focus of the story as she tries to look after Evangeline's infant daughter.
The remainder of the book concentrates on the sufferings of the women convicts in Hobart's Cascades prison, and their treatment by local settlers or ex-convicts.
The Exiles needs to be read as a searing account of the travails of women in 1840's England.
The sufferings and indignities heaped on women are made even worse for anyone who is convicted of a petty crime and added to if they end up as convicts shipped to the other side of the world.
The author takes great care to impress on the reader the hopelessness of the situations faced by the women.
The book works best as a work of history and a learned advocacy on behalf of women.
The story, such as it is, is disjointed and of lesser significance.
The Aboriginal girl Mathinna, for example, drops out of the story into youthful alcohol and has little connection with the English characters. (Interestingly, she is briefly referred to in Richard Flanagan's latest novel The Living Sea of Waking Dreams).
The men, with the exception of the ship's doctor, are all cruel, careless and predatory.
In an acknowledgement note at the end, the American author writes of her time in Australia as a Rotary 'ambassador' and her delight in the "wide open vistas and the offhanded friendliness" of the locals.
But, she adds, "When I did press them to talk about race and class, I was gently, subtly rebuked". This attitude of Australians to their history is a challenging subject for a novel, and the attempt to do so here has limited success.
