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.
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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