A Room Made of Leaves

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Tačiau skaityti gali būti įdomu – aš dabar jau tiksliai žinau, kokių žinių bagažą noriu papildyti ir kokias istorines spragas sieksiu užpildyti. Her only source documents in the book (the letters that the real Elizabeth wrote home to her family and friends) are recast almost as parody, with Grenville's Elizabeth explaining away how when she said she was 'abundantly content' she, of course, meant the opposite. He put his hand on his heart with a delicate movement, a caress of himself, fingers spread on his coat, and tilted his head questioningly, submissively, yearningly. An ingenious tapestry of history and invention, A Room Made of Leaves is a novel of womanhood, motherhood, secrets, lies, obsession, transformation and the loss of innocence. But this is an entirely different, convincing and empathetic take on what she may have felt and what may have motivated her.

I have very mixed feelings about this book – I really enjoyed the story about life for the settlers in Sydney’s earliest days, and I really like Kate Grenville’s beautiful and evocative writing style. Grenville cleverly uses Elizabeth’s bland and pleasant missives home, showing that they were a carefully constructed fiction. If, like me, you knew absolutely nothing then your judgment of the book will be based solely on the quality of the writing and the skill with which the story is told. The story unfolds in small chapter-fragments, their short paragraphs packed with gorgeous descriptions of the Australian landscape — “a slice of harbor rough and blue like lapis”, a stone overhang “with a fraying underside, soft as cake, that glowed yellow” — and compressed emotional power.Regrettably, I couldn’t feel the same enthusiasm for the book as the judges of the Walter Scott Prize – which probably means it might well win! This story, told through Grenville’s sharp lens, is one that will stay with the reader for a long time. He was a man with a very ordinary heritage, his father was a Scottish draper and it seems he was a man wanting to be part of the gentry but without the means to become one. It really only picked up for me towards the end when the reader is finally introduced to the ‘room made of leaves’.

Acknowledgment is presented here as the beginning of redemption: “I am prepared to look in the eye what we have done,” she insists, to admit the “hard truth” of colonial theft and wrong-doing. It reveals the strength and determination deep within Elizabeth; her passions, her love, her empathy. Williams also invents a character through which to experience the world, and gives some of the real people nicknames. The read describes Elizabeth as an educated woman, her parents were both educated farmers of some wealth. He tells her he is to take up a position as Lieutenant in a New South Wales penal colony and she has no choice but to go.

Elizabeth reflects at the end with much remorse the cost of all of her success to the detriment of the original peoples of the land.

Inspired by the real life of a remarkable woman, this is an extraordinarily rich, beautifully wrought novel of resilience, courage, and the mystery of human desire. Twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth is hungry for life but, as the ward of a Devon clergyman, knows she has few prospects. Despite having no feelings for her husband she begins a new life there; one that will last until her death in 1850. The myth about Elizabeth is that, when John was away in England for two long periods, she kept the family sheep empire going, a loving, industrious, pious helpmeet to her husband.The early years in Sydney, the lives of settlers, those there by choice and those not, and their relationships with the First Nation peoples, the living conditions, and the work of the astronomer and botanist, William Dawes, have already been covered in The Secret River and particularly in The Lieutenant. At the same time, she sees herself as more of a thief than her convict servant who was transported for stealing. I felt as though I was living through her, I had traveled back in time to this unknown land and all of a sudden history was been stitched together in front of me.

I was hoping this story would be more about her character and establishing and running Elizabeth Farm in her husband's absences but this seemed to be only a footnote at the end of the novel. In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. This is the story of a woman making the best she can from an unfortunate marriage at a time when there was no escape; it is also the story of the first and cruel colonisation of the country and the establishment of the penal colony.Kate Grenville has now written several books set in the early years of the British colonisation of New South Wales and while this one treads slightly different territory to its predecessors, there is necessarily some cross over of events and personnel. It was about the dangerous power of false stories, false surfaces, myths, and they way they can erase the truth.