Printed in italics rather than inverted commas, and absorbed within paragraphs of narrative prose, direct speech is kept to a minimum. (All the Sir Walter Scott gadzookery.) This novel uses dialogue very sparingly. Grenville knows that it is in speech that historical fiction most often sounds like pantomime. Though this is a story that includes violent action, it is peculiarly internal. So the past is re-created through his often confused perceptions. An 'agony of light' streams over him when he arrives in this bright, hot place.

We all know about the arrival of convicts, but, as ever, Thornhill hardly understands the historical significance of the story Grenville, as narrator, even has to intervene to tell us about the establishment of Sydney as a destination of transport ships. The novel reimagines a small part of the coast of New South Wales, including the area now covered by the city of Sydney, in its primordial strangeness, 'this other place'. Convicted for theft, he is transported to Australia. How to shift the oar from the rowing crutch in the bow, canting the blade with a turn of the wrist, then running along the narrow gunwale with the oar as far as the quarter.' Such details are there to win the reader's confidence, but the knowledge will also earn its keep later in the novel, when Thornhill has to master a new river in a new land. 'How an oar, four times as long as a man, could take charge of its owner. (Her great-great-great-grandfather was a former Thames waterman who did indeed arrive in Sydney as a convict.) Here is where the historical research is most visible, as we follow his apprenticeship and get told the tricks of the river. In her closing Acknowledgments, Grenville tells us that Thornhill was based on one of her own ancestors. What he knows is his job as a London waterman, rowing people or goods across the Thames. This is to be a novel about what its protagonist cannot see. The opening section, describing his life and crimes in London at the end of the 18th century, is all blocked vision, 'the alleyways no more than a stride across, and dimmed even on the brightest day'. Thornhill himself hardly knows what year he is living in. So, though this is a 'historical novel', it carries very little sense of a distinct period, and includes no historical events. The narrative is refracted through his consciousness and therefore must reflect his ignorance. Her protagonist, William Thornhill, is poor and uneducated indeed, for the first part of the novel he is entirely illiterate. C an you imagine how a person from the distant past saw the world? In The Secret River, Kate Grenville tries something harder than just thinking her way back into the head of a person from a different age.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville