July 18, 2011

Mr Darwin's Shooter (#101a)

Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald 


What I said then:

One of those Australian historical novels that looks duller than words can describe. Hopefully it’s better than I expect.

What I say now:

When I was a kid, one of the big traditions in my family was that we'd all get a big pile of books as one of our presents on our birthdays, and another big pile at Christmas. It was Mum who made the choices, and while I was still living at home she used to hit the nail on the head every single year. 

(I'm particularly thankful for the haul I got on my sixteenth birthday. At the time I was still into Stephen King, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer, but that year Mum decided it was time to move me on from thrillers to 'literature.' Amongst other things, I got Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and The Magus by John Fowles. Collectively those three books made my head explode, in the best possible way. Suddenly books could be more than entertainment, they could be art. They were amazing, perfect choices. Thanks, Mum.)

But once I was at uni, my Mum's idea of my taste in books began to slip away from the reality. Suddenly my book-gifts weren't always things I liked, or even things I was interested in. Things came to a head when, just as I was discovering J.G. Ballard and Bret Easton Ellis, I was given a batch of Australian historical novels that looked duller than words can describe. Which brings me to Mr Darwin's Shooter, a birthday or Christmas present that has stayed on my shelves, unread, for about a decade. Which isn't really fair to either Roger McDonald or my Mum, because it actually wasn't too bad.

The novel is split into two intersecting story threads. In one half, a young boy named Syms Covington leaves his home in rural England for a life at sea, eventually finding himself on the HMS Beagle, working as Charles Darwin's steward for the length of their voyage. These sea-going, nature-observing, bird-skinning scenes alternate with passages in which Covington, in middle-age, waits in his new Australian home for the first copies of Darwin's Origin of Species to arrive. In the intervening years, he and Darwin have kept up a correspondence, and he is aware of what the book will contain; as a Christian, he is torn between pride at Darwin's achievements and horror at the heresy he has been a part of. Covington really existed; much of the book is based on his diaries, which are kept at a library in Sydney.

I'm a bit of a fool for a sea-going tale (hell, I even tried to write one.), so I was naturally drawn to the Beagle sequences. The background information on the collecting of samples was fascinating, and the byplay between the rough-and-tumble Covington and the truth-seeking Darwin was fun. The Sydney-set chapters were less successful: Covington's spiritual discombobulation is buried beneath a rather annoying plot-thread about an annoying neighbour's attempts to get to know him (and seduce his daughter!). I could have done without that character altogether, and I thought those sections would have benefited enormously from a tighter focus on Covington himself.

I was disappointed by the last third of this book: ultimately the two strands of the story didn't connect in any satisfying way. I was left feeling that I'd learned a lot, but not feeling moved. And hey, if I wanted to know about Darwin, I could go read Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle myself, y'know?

We ended up ditching the book-giving tradition, probably due in some part to the unimpressed look on my face when I unwrapped Mr Darwin's Shooter. But now I've read it, and there's no way that it deserved a decade on the shelf. I should've trusted my Mum.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin. Uh-oh, this is the second time in a row that I've used my 'I get to get a book!' to buy the new entry in an epic fantasy series. My geek is showing. But it's nothing to be ashamed of: Martin is a master of narrative and, with the HBO show winning raves and garnering him new fans, the whole world's beginning to realise it.
books to go: still 101

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