The Lieutenant - Kate Grenville

The Lieutenant is set during the initial British settlement in New South Wales in 1788, and describes the impact on a young astronomer of a tentative friendship he forms with an Aboriginal child with the intention of learning her language. His character is convincingly drawn and easy to empathise with, starting with his childhood in Portsmouth where he is initially dismissed as stupid "for failing to respond to a question so simple he had not thought to answer it". I enjoyed, and found plausible, the way in which the plot develops as the unsociable outsider, who has always found it hard to relate to his peers and retreats alone into a love of mathematics and order, is paradoxically the only one who is able to recognise and connect with the humanity of the "other" as he discovers a shared enjoyment of language and learning with the Aboriginal girl Tagaran. I was also moved - and challenged! - by the moral strength of his eventual refusal to rationalise and compromise to ensure his own survival, as he concludes that:

"If an action was wrong, it did not matter whether it succeeded or not, or how many clever steps you took to make sure it failed. If you were part of such an act, you were part of its wrong... If you were part of that machine, then you were part of its evil."

In fact, I found his courage and integrity almost unconvincingly impressive - until I reached the author's endnote and was delighted to discover that the book was inspired by true events. I think that this novel captivated me a little less than it deserved to because I'd already read her previous book, The Secret River, which (together with her account of writing it, Searching for the Secret River) covers some of the same territory (geographically as well as thematically), and did make a huge impression on me.