The Exiles
1840. Exiles opens with Mathinna, an aboriginal child, who has been taken in by the Governor of Australia’s wife as a ‘curiosity’; how can she survive the loss of her family, her culture and her language? In London, Evangeline, pregnant and falsely accused of theft, is awaiting transportation to Australia – as is Hazel, who befriends her. The voyage will take at least six months. How can they survive the trials and hardships to reach Australia, endure the grim prison system, and find a way to live in this alien land?
The author has plainly done her research and she is extraordinarily good at getting across mid-19th century assumptions and prejudices about class and gender roles. She gets us to understand from the inside what the female prisoners, being poor, unheard and without the safety net of even the most elementary justice, are thinking and feeling. The feeling of abandonment Evangeline and Hazel suffer, and the deficiencies of the options open to them, are hauntingly real. But these women are fighters. To survive, they must first understand the prison system and find a way to negotiate a possible future for themselves and those they love in this new and unfriendly world. Women who fail could die.
There is no doubt that Christina Baker Kline is a writer of great power. She also illuminates what happens when one sex has almost complete power over the lives (or deaths) of the other; some men behave well, but many take their privileged status as a God-given right. Unfortunately, what jerked me out of the story was the intrusion of some anachronistic given names. Ruby, and other jewel names, first appear in the 1870s; plant names like Olive and Hazel, came in in the 1890s. It’s a great pity because, otherwise, Exiles is a great read.
