The Power Game: The Monsarrat Series
A boatman is murdered on a remote island off Van Diemen’s Land, in convict-era Australia. The authorities seek to convict a well-known political prisoner, Irish rebel and aristocrat Tom Power, for the murder. A detective and former convict, Hugh Monsarrat, and his sidekick, housekeeper Mrs Mulrooney, are sent to Maria Island to investigate, and quickly doubt the motives of those assigning blame to Power. There are others who wanted the boatman silenced, so Monserrat and Mulrooney are soon asking awkward questions about why an Irish revolutionary is apparently being scapegoated for political ends.
This is the third of the Monsarrat and Mulrooney crime series set in the 1820s, when colonial Australia was emerging from early privations into a more settled identity. The Keneally father-and-daughter writing partnership has done exhaustive research, on everything from the political spirit of the times to settings and weather. Hobart Town, in Van Diemen’s Land, is conjured well: “slabs of pinch-windowed, honey-stoned buildings…found themselves reflected in the harbour.” There are nice touches, such as a referral to “the only mirror on the island,” and where the book really shines is bringing the cruelties of imprisonment then and there to life, with Elisabeth Brewster, the enigmatic wife of the island’s commandant, talking of a cell where “the roof is too low for a man to stand up in and the walls too close to lie down” – a horrific glimpse into the travails of those imprisoned in convict-era Australia. The story, too, is based on true stories of Irish nationalists who were transported, centred on the history of William Smith O’Brien, the son of a baronet, who was transported in 1848 and survived to more than tell the tale.
Although I enjoyed this vivid and pacey mystery, at times I struggled with the expansive number of characters in the book, and the sense that Irish characters were sometimes rather romanticised. The horrors of colonialism are all true, but light and shade in fictional tellings such as this might help readers understand better our shameful colonial past.
