A Room Made of Leaves

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The epigraph to A Room Made of Leaves issues a warning that resonates throughout the novel, as Kate Grenville invites the reader to reflect on the complex relationship between truth and falsehood, history and fiction. I was hot with a sudden shame for being wilful, as well as for having no looks and no portion, ashamed that no one would want me.

This is the story of a woman making the best she can from an unfortunate marriage at a time when there was no escape; it is also the story of the first and cruel colonisation of the country and the establishment of the penal colony. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality. Before that was the feeling that that the day could last as long as I wished, and none of it needed to be spent indoors.

It was set as a book club read, but our meeting has been postponed until December and I can't yet include views of my real life reading friends. A Room Made of Leaves is the explosive biographical novel by Booker-shortlisted Australian author Kate Grenville and boy was it worth the almost decade long wait. Her descriptions of pseudo fact woven from real, incidents and people are in themselves convincing and could easily be an alternative truth. But mostly, because my least favourite trope is author on board, and this is (in certain ways) a less explicit version of that, I cannot bring myself to give it more than 1 star.

Her fiction is always a challenge, a goad to our complacencies, social decorums and repressions…Richly imagined…[Provides] the shock we perhaps need to remind us of what might still be possible. At the novel's heart is the imposing backdrop of the Australian countryside, beautiful but uncompromising. She was on her own – for four years during her husband’s first absence, nine years the second – in a brutal society, yet she came to thrive. After the American Independence war his income was halved and after an unsuccessful posting in Gibraltar he secured a position as lieutenant in the NSW corps raising his profile but at what cost?This story, told through Grenville’s sharp lens, is one that will stay with the reader for a long time. A woman from Devon makes one mistake and ends up marrying a man she does not like, and having to move to Australia with him. He tells her he is to take up a position as Lieutenant in a New South Wales penal colony and she has no choice but to go. Her only source documents in the book (the letters that the real Elizabeth wrote home to her family and friends) are recast almost as parody, with Grenville's Elizabeth explaining away how when she said she was 'abundantly content' she, of course, meant the opposite.

The early years in Sydney, the lives of settlers, those there by choice and those not, and their relationships with the First Nation peoples, the living conditions, and the work of the astronomer and botanist, William Dawes, have already been covered in The Secret River and particularly in The Lieutenant. Autorė rašo nepaprastai gražiai, melodingai ir įtraukiančiai, tačiau negaliu pasakyti, kad išjaučiau daugiau ką, nei tik pagrindinę veikėją – aišku, ji esminė, bet visgi – ne vienintelė, o ir autorė visai nesusikoncentruoja į tuos jos gyvenimo aspektus, kurie darė ją išskirtinę – verslininkės, fermerės, mokslininkės talentus. The read describes Elizabeth as an educated woman, her parents were both educated farmers of some wealth. However one day she makes her companions swear to secrecy as she ventures further and then further and discovers the hut of William Dawes. At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age: the seductive appeal of false stories.There was the feeling of fields, and animals busy about their own lives, and the way those lives were bound intimately to mine. Sailing for six months to the far side of the globe with a child growing inside her, she arrives to find Sydney Town a brutal, dusty, hungry place of makeshift shelters, failing crops, scheming and rumours. They travel to New South Wales where Elizabeth finds her true home, not only the land but home to herself too. I, like many others, went into this book easily fooled that this book was indeed just a collection of memoirs, simply transcribed and made more digestible by Kate Grenville.