A life and dreams built on blood

Fiction: Survival is as much about compromise and deception as it is about courage. The gifted Australian writer Kate Grenville makes this reality clear in her outstanding new novel, The Secret River.

Here is an honest, brutal story that confronts the personal battles that make up the story of modern Australia. Since the publication in Australia in 1985 of her debut, Lilian's Story, Grenville has asserted herself as a writer of powerful, dark, often funny fictions that share the black vision of Peter Carey. She won the 2001 Orange Prize with An Idea of Perfection.There are few laughs in The Secret River but there are abundant truths. This is a novel everyone should read - it is an exploration of human nature and the difficulties of trying to live honourably within the limits imposed by compromise. Grenville has set out to plot the true settlement of Australia.

She is not interested in myths or romance. In order to make a new life for themselves, the settlers had to destroy the people who already lived there.

The Secret River is an account of conquest, not by armies, but by individuals who, having been given a desperate second chance, grabbed it with both hands.

William Thornhill, a Thames waterman, desperately attempting to make a living and ensure his children don't have to endure the hardships of his own London childhood, commits one bout of thieving too many and is deported to Australia.

Grenville brilliantly evokes the late 18th- and early 19th-century world that shapes Thornhill. As a boy he had collected dog dirt off the streets, under the direction of his father, to sell to the factory. Early in life he learns to fight his corner. It is hard and bleak, and Grenville, whose prose glides as easily and as relentlessly as water over stones, enters into an atmospheric Dickensian world that is free of pathos.

These opening London sequences prove very important as it is against this background that her central characters develop in their new country; Thornhill, neither a hero nor a villain, just an ordinary man, and his wife, Sal, who never forgets England. Their first impressions of Australia, particularly those of Sal, are viewed against what they remember of London.

For Sal, the rain, even the trees, are so different. Arrival in Australia, "at the end of the earth" acts as an overture to the narrative. Grenville sets the scene by introducing William Thornhill, "transported for the term of his natural life in the Year of our Lord eighteen hundred and six" as he passes his first night in "His majesty's penal colony of New South Wales." Having spent almost a year at sea, he is now on dry land. Outside it he can feel the night "huge and damp" and is conscious of being "nothing more than a flea on the side of some enormous quiet creature." He is also aware that it is here he will die. His thoughts quickly yield to his noting that a stranger is standing before him. The man is an Aborigine, the first Thornhill has ever seen and not the last.

It is an important encounter. Thornhill's response, one of terrified defiance, is interesting in the context of what is to follow. But before pursuing this strand of the narrative, there is a vivid flashback to Thornhill's early life in London and the crime that has brought him to Australia. Grenville does not attempt pastiche, yet achieves an Old World/New World balance as well as a sense of period.

She controls terrifying material without resorting to polemic. Her sense of humanity elevates her work beyond simple rage or sentimentality. This is why she is a major writer and, with Peter Carey, is a worthy heir of Patrick White.

Her Dark Places (1994), one of the finest Australian novels yet written, is eloquent and angry, as is The Secret River. While the earlier book caught the sense of colonised urban Australia, The Secret River travels further back into the past. Now in a new country, Thornhill begins to build a life and grasps the surreal chance of landownership offered to former convicts. He meets people, who like him, have been despatched in disgrace from the mother country and discovers land is there, all he has to do is take it from the natives. The narrative draws immense strength from Grenville's astute handling of Thornhill's character and perceptions. His responses are fascinating because they are ordinary and non heroic. He learns as much about himself as he does about his new country. There is also the tension existing between William Thornhill landowner and William Thornhill, felon.

Above all, he never forgets. No matter how detailed Thornhill's reinventions become, he can never escape his past. Relations develop and change between Thornhill and the natives, he acquires, or perhaps he always had it, the ruthlessness of the settlers.

Ultimately Sal, who for years wants to bring her children "home" to their country, the England they have never seen, respects the differences between the settlers and the natives. It is a tough, hard novel. Grenville is a realist as well as a thinker and knows "a man's heart was a deep pocket he might turn out and be amazed at what he found there."

Drama and conflict degenerate into violence and again here, she demonstrates exactly how well and how evocatively she writes. Dark Places should have won the 1994 Booker prize. It was not even shortlisted. The Secret River offers a multi dimensional study of how a history is shaped - as seen through the desire and guilt of one man's salvation It should be acknowledged as a wonderful novel and an important statement about theft and dreams built on blood.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Secret River By Kate Grenville Canongate, 334pp, £12.99