Book Review - A Dream More Luminous than Love by Rodney Hall

 A Dream More Luminous than Love by Rodney Hall

Sydney: Picador Australia, 1994                                   ISBN 0330274910

(The Second Bridegroom first published 1991, The Grisly Wife first published 1993, Captivity Captive first published 1988)

Every time I read Rodney Hall I am reminded how good a writer he is - whether it's his poetry, or the novels I've read over the years, his descriptive power and skilful narrative style has sucked me into a different and challenging world, that stays with me long after I've put down the text.

A Dream More Luminous than Love is a collection of three novels (The Second Bridegroom, The Grisly Wife, and Captivity Captive) that cover over a hundred years of white settlement at the fictional Yandilli, on the South Coast of New South Wales. While each novel is of a piece (in fact Hall wrote the third part of the trilogy before the first, and the second after the other two), as a collective they trace the settlement of Australia, the dispossession of the natives, and the development of a particular type of Australian character, born from the origins of the settlers and the vicissitudes of the country they found themselves in.

Which brings me to the issue of reviewing this work - three separate stories, yet linked through time, and more especially, place. I've decided to write some general comments on the trilogy, and then append separate reviews of each book at the end of the general comments.

Taken as a whole, I think A Dream More Luminous than Love looks at a few themes. The (changing) European reaction to Australia runs through each book. Escaping into the bush in The Second Bridegroom, the forger takes the country and the indigenous inhabitants as they come, adapting himself as far as possible to the country, rather than trying to adapt the country to himself, as the Atholls are attempting. In The Grisly Wife we see the land and Aboriginals becoming more peripheral to the story - Muley, Catherine and the disciples arrive determined to make a mark on society with their beliefs, but instead turn inward, owing to the noticeable "Australian" culture that was beginning to form in the 1800s. While the naked bush is still feared, the "naked savage" is more a curiosity than a threat. In Captivity Captive, it is clear that the general thought is that the land is there to be won for human use (although Nature in the form of drought still has something to say about that), the original inhabitants are now merely stock background for fairground photographs and completely excluded from life, which has become an Australian shadow of Europe's clans and religions.

The Forger, Muley and his disciples, and the Malone family are all outsiders in the societies they inhabit. All of them learn to rely on their own devices to make their way in the world. While the forger is mostly alone, the group dynamics of both the disciples and the Malones are investigated fully, and Hall comes to some disturbing conclusions about how we humans exercise control over others, and use what powers we have to wound our brothers and sisters. While there is little that is truly evil in these novels, there is precious little that is good, and those who are thoughtful and introspective are the ones that are in the most danger from the others, especially because perceptions of others can be wrong.

The dangers of love run through each book as well - driving people mad, driving them to murder, and consuming lives, misguided love destroys every protagonist in these books - the forger, Catherine Byrne and Patrick Malone all have their lives destroyed by loving when they shouldn't. It is not good to be alive in these times, whether it be as a convict on the run in the early 1800s, part of a religious cult in the mid 1800s, or the son of a harsh father on a small selection in the late 1800s. Australia may have been a land of opportunity, but it was not for those people that populate these novels.

A Dream More Luminous than Love, taken as a whole, is a wonderfully well-written trilogy of novels about time, place, and human desire - well worth reading.

Reviews of each part  follow -

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The Second Bridegroom (part 1 of the Yandilli trilogy), deals with the early settlement of New South Wales. We follow the story of a convict (a forger from the Isle of Man) who is assigned to Mr. Atholl and shipped to southern New South Wales to assist in carving out a selection from the virgin bush. The forger, taking his chance, escapes, only to by "captured" by the local Aboriginals, who treat him as some sort of king or god - waiting on him hand and foot, but not allowing him freedom. We are given descriptions of the country, and memories from the forger's youth -  his father's execution for smuggling, the history of the Isle of Man, especially the Celtic legend of the Queen who took a summer bridegroom (a horse) and a Winter bridegroom (a goat), one having to kill the other to take on the mantle.

Eventually our forger is brought back by the Clan to the (now much improved) settlement. He breaks a tribal taboo by seeing one of the women, so she must be killed. That night the Aboriginals attack the settlement and burn it to the ground, spearing Mr. Atholl who in the melee attacks and tries to kill the forger, but he escapes back to the bush.

Here he runs into another convict Dean, whom the forger thought he had killed on the boat journey from Sydney to Yandilli, and who now seems to have some sort of brain damage owing to the forger's attempt to suffocate him for being overly brutal. Dean leads him back to the settlement where the forger is locked into a storeroom. It is then we realise that the story we have been reading is because the forger spends his time while locked in that room writing a series of letters to Mrs. Atholl, whom he is convinced orchestrated the attack on the settlement, shot and killed her husband so that the forger and her can be together (he sees himself as the second bridegroom of the legend).

The final pages of the novel consist of a letter from Mrs. Atholl to the newly installed Governer Gipps asking for troops to be sent down from Sydney to find the forger, who has once more escaped. In the course of the letter we realise that, far from being the romantic figure the forger perceives her to be, Mrs. Atholl is a stern taskmistress, driven to succeed, and a far harder person than her husband ever was. She wishes the forger to be caught and hanged, and if the Aboriginal tribe that harboured him is "taught a lesson" in the process, so much the better. 

Hall uses the forger's story to meditate on what is genuine and who gets the right to decide in the world, and can things actually be "discovered" in the sense that was used in the early 1800s, as well as brilliantly exposing the dislocation felt by the early white settlers to this country.

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The Grisly Wife (part 2 of the Yandilli trilogy) sees Hall move the date forward, but the place remains the same. The Grisly Wife is not a story of convicts and first contact, but more a story of belief, power, and trying to adapt to a foreign land.

This book was written to connect the two part of the trilogy that Hall had already written, and so there are some slight plot twists to ensure the connections are made which don't detract from the story.

And the story if of Catherine Byrne, daughter of a vicar in Stroud, who get married to a bootmaker and iterant preacher: they, with their "disciples" (all women), sail to Australia and make their way to Yandilli, where Catherine was hoping they would begin to convert the heathen natives to Christianity. Her husband, who has taken the name Muley Moloch in penitence for his sins, has different ideas. Catherine and the rest of the women see Muley as a prophet (Catherine firmly believes she saw him levitate on the day she met him) and he takes firm control of the group via the standard cultish methods of self and group criticism sessions, and blaming any setbacks on the sin of the members. After a short time in Yandilli itself (where they are shunned, and we learn incidentally that Mrs. Atholl did indeed murder her husband, and was hanged for it), Catherine drives Muley to purchase land in the bush where they can set up a commune.

Catherine suffers from Tuberculosis but recovers, unlike most of the other women, who die in turn through the course of the novel. While Muley is away finalizing the purchase of their land Catherine realises she is pregnant, but doesn't understand how it happened. She wishes for Muley to die so she doesn't have to confront him with this inconvenient fact, and indeed the steamer he returns on is wrecked just off Yandilli, but Muley survives, and seemingly brings a young woman back to life after she had drowned - another miracle? This woman, Louisa, turns out to be a new disciple. She names Catherine "the grisly wife" in an attempt to get Muley to shun her.

Catherine reveals her pregnancy, only to have the sect decide that she is carrying the returning Saviour. Muley arranges for the birth to be photographed. Immanuel, the child that ensues is unruly, and eventually flees the compound. In their search for him, Muley shoots and kills the forger from The Second Bridegroom, whom Immanuel was living with in the bush. Immanuel flees again (eventually writing to his mother from England, where he has connected with her family).

In the washup from this tragedy, Muley reveals that he had in fact raped his wife when she was insensible during her illness so the child is mortal after all, and Muley is merely John Heaps, bootmaker. The commune dies with this revelation, and over time the only members left are Catherine and Louisa, who have made peace with each other, and John, having returned from "exile" as their manservant.

As the story moves along, the reader understands that not only is Catherine narrating this story to a listener, but that listener is in fact the local police sergeant, who is investigating a murder. Catherine has assumed that he has found out about the death of the forger, but the police are looking for clues to help solve the murders that form the heart of the story for the third book of this trilogy.

The Grisly Wife moves the story of settlement on from The Second Bridegroom: the characters arrived in Australia by choice, not as over-awed by finding themselves in an alien land, and determined to live their own life rather than have their life dictated by the country (Muley's determination to have a lawn being the evidence of that). The Atholls and their kind have won - the forger is defeated, the natives have retreated and are only peripheral to the activities of the settlers, and convicts are fading from history as well.

This is more a story of love, jealousy, belief and disappointment. Hardship is a given - although not presented as such in the novel, the degradation of the women from genteel lives in England to hard scrabble in the dirt of New South Wales comes through in each page. The "disciples" distinctions of class and feeling rapidly become meaningless when faced with the realities of living and dying in the Australia of the mid 1800s

The thought of Yandilli being a cursed place is one that begins to form in the reader's mind as well reading the books back-to-back, a thought that will only become stronger as we move onto the last book of the trilogy.

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Captivity Captive (part 3 of the Yandilli Trilogy) is a book I have read before. It uses as its base a real historical event, the Gatton Murders, which Hall has moved to Yandilli and tampered with to fit his fictional requirements. It is in part detective story, family saga, disquisition on life and love, but mostly a tale of increasing horror at what man is capable of.

Like the other books in the trilogy, this is a tale told through the eyes of one man - Patrick Malone - one of ten children who live at "Paradise" outside Yandilli, a small holding cut out of the bush by Patrick's  grandfather and enlarged by his father, a huge dominant man who accepts no rivals to his power over the family, beating Patrick's brother William so hard that he damaged his brain.

The book revolves around the murder of two of Patrick's sisters, Norah and Ellen, and one of his brothers, Michael. They are found beaten to death, with the girls also having been raped, and no one was ever charged with the deaths.

The book begins with a death-bed confession of Barney Barnett to the murders, which is not credible. Patrick, William and Jeremiah - the surviving Malones - are at his deathbed, and so Patrick decides to write the story of what really happened, fifty years after the events, himself an old man. 

The story is strange and brutal. Each of the ten Malone children is different. William was beaten because he wanted to get away. Michael is beaten because he wants to have fun. Norah is mother hen to the rest of the children. Ellen is the amoral watcher of everything. Jeremiah is inheritor of his father's world.... each of them live in fear of both their father and mother, who dominate them physically and mentally. They are outsiders from society, not mixing with others, and proud of their self-sufficiency. Their world is one of work, a private world only understood by other members of the family.

In The Grisly Wife the Protestant "disciples" felt the wrath of the mainly Catholic population of Yandilli, but in Captivity Captive we are drawn into the world of Irish Catholicism in Australia, the clannishness and connection to Irish nationalism being a more dominant feeling than any particular feeling of being "Australian". The story is set during the time when Australia was moving toward Federation, but that is clearly of no importance to the protagonists.

Morality is key to this novel. Christian morality certainly, but Malone morality particularly. With no real interactions with the outside world, the residents of "Paradise" interact with each other, and grow close - too close in the case of Patrick, Michael, Norah and Ellen.

Patrick and Michael think it is love, and on that tragic night they consummated it. In a dream-like narrative nothing is fully clear, but it seems that Norah particularly doesn't see it that way. She shoots Michael - Barney, while not guilty of the whole tragedy, bludgeons Ellen to death, having witnessed his fiance with Michael. William, who has witnessed the whole thing, bludgeons Norah, after she explains she has been raped by Patrick. William initially was looking to kill Patrick, but, in his simple-minded way understood that it was Norah who wished death, even though Patrick voiced his own wish to die.

Patrick cleans up the site, so that Norah can die blameless for the murder of Michael. He and William continue to live on at Paradise, with the ghost of their father, keeping the history to themselves, until Patrick decides to set it down.

This a short book, but the themes are complex - belief, control, love, belonging - the meaning of life in fact. 

A great book!

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell