Promised Lands

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 31. MÄRZ 1997

Everyone has a vision of how things ought to be in Rogers's blazingly intelligent and intricate fifth novel. In January 1788, Lieutenant William Dawes, a 26-year-old British naval officer and astronomer, arrives in Australia as part of the First Fleet of England bearing convicts to colonize the territory. A precise, moral, religious man, Dawes believes in the promise of rebirth the new land holds for the convicts. "Burdened with conscience" as he is, however, he's unsettled by the natives' first words to the arriving immigrants: "Warra! Warra!" (Go away!). A few pages into Dawes's story, Rogers reveals that this third-person narrative is being written in the 1980s by another British idealist, Stephen Beech, a disgraced former schoolteacher. As deputy head of Campfield Comprehensive, Beech had dreamed of reforming the struggling school into a place of total equality. Instead, the school collapsed, leaving him to question, like Dawes, issues of responsibility, order and civilization. Their narratives are joined by a tortured third, that of Stephen's Polish wife, Olla, who, after a series of miscarriages and the death of one infant, has just given birth to a severely brain-damaged child, Daniel. Refusing to accept the doctors' prognosis, Olla persists in believing that Daniel is "remarkable," a redeemer come to save the world from evil. Compromise, destruction or salvation await each of the three visionaries. Intensely atmospheric, structurally sophisticated and deeply political, this is a challenging and hypnotic work. Rogers (Mr. Wroes's Virgins, etc.) brings graceful intelligence and a tough compassion to her literary autopsy of various personal and political utopias.