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In which Hornung finally gets to the first thing everyone knows about colonial Australia. (It would make a good compare-and-contrast with Alan Garner's Strandloper, for someone with more literary analysis skill than me).
The Rogue's March tells the story of Tom Erichsen, a clergyman's son who is wrongly convicted for murder, under somewhat contrived circumstances, and has his capital sentence reduced to transportation following the intervention of a mysterious benefactor. Of course, he soon finds out what sort of salvation the life of a transported convict really is. Unlike Hornung's previous books, the setting is historical: it takes place in the 1830s, when transportation was still fairly widely used as a sentence for such crimes (it was no longer practised by the 1890s). The book is in three parts: the first focusses on the murder and Tom's trial and sentencing, the second his life as a convict in Australia, and the third his eventual recovery from that life, all accompanied by the romantic drama and twisting plot that Hornung loves so much.
Now, the decision to have a book all about criminal punishment focus on a character who's innocent of the crime he's punished for is an interesting one, and at first I was a bit concerned that Hornung was simply shying away from treating an actually criminal character sympathetically (as I think he did in Irralie's Bushranger). But what's actually going on here is more complex. The second part of the book portrays vividly the horror and cruelty of the treatment of transported convicts, in prisons and factories and as farm servants: Tom becomes a groom on a farm run by a pair of petty despots who more-or-less arbitrarily hate him and decide to make his life as difficult as they can, framing him for things he didn't do and provoking him to acts that they can punish him more harshly for. He becomes desperate and is driven to really criminal acts: joining a gang of bushrangers, taking part in a raid on the farm he once worked on and shooting a man in the arm. The imagery and mood were very evocative, and the chapter involving the cat-o'-nine-tails was genuinely harrowing to read.
The point of all this is very clear: Tom wasn't a criminal to begin with, but the injustice and brutality he experiences as a convict turn him into one. (At one point near the end, he actually says he no longer considers himself innocent for just this reason). By starting with an innocent man, this point is made all the more powerful, and it's one the late nineteenth century—with its early eugenic theories of 'criminal type' and hereditary criminality, and its somewhat-reformed but still horrifically harsh justice system—badly needed to hear. And there are plenty of complex criminals amongst the minor characters who Tom meets in prison, amongst the bushrangers and in the chain-gang.
This was all very interesting, but it sat rather uncomfortably alongside some of the other stuff in the book. It's spoiler time...
( Drama and plot twists below )
The Rogue's March is quite a bit longer and much more ambitious than anything Hornung had written before, and if it doesn't always seem perfectly clear about where those ambitions are going, it was still a very interesting and enjoyable read. Once again recommended for those interested in the literary currents leading towards the Raffles stories...
The Rogue's March tells the story of Tom Erichsen, a clergyman's son who is wrongly convicted for murder, under somewhat contrived circumstances, and has his capital sentence reduced to transportation following the intervention of a mysterious benefactor. Of course, he soon finds out what sort of salvation the life of a transported convict really is. Unlike Hornung's previous books, the setting is historical: it takes place in the 1830s, when transportation was still fairly widely used as a sentence for such crimes (it was no longer practised by the 1890s). The book is in three parts: the first focusses on the murder and Tom's trial and sentencing, the second his life as a convict in Australia, and the third his eventual recovery from that life, all accompanied by the romantic drama and twisting plot that Hornung loves so much.
Now, the decision to have a book all about criminal punishment focus on a character who's innocent of the crime he's punished for is an interesting one, and at first I was a bit concerned that Hornung was simply shying away from treating an actually criminal character sympathetically (as I think he did in Irralie's Bushranger). But what's actually going on here is more complex. The second part of the book portrays vividly the horror and cruelty of the treatment of transported convicts, in prisons and factories and as farm servants: Tom becomes a groom on a farm run by a pair of petty despots who more-or-less arbitrarily hate him and decide to make his life as difficult as they can, framing him for things he didn't do and provoking him to acts that they can punish him more harshly for. He becomes desperate and is driven to really criminal acts: joining a gang of bushrangers, taking part in a raid on the farm he once worked on and shooting a man in the arm. The imagery and mood were very evocative, and the chapter involving the cat-o'-nine-tails was genuinely harrowing to read.
The point of all this is very clear: Tom wasn't a criminal to begin with, but the injustice and brutality he experiences as a convict turn him into one. (At one point near the end, he actually says he no longer considers himself innocent for just this reason). By starting with an innocent man, this point is made all the more powerful, and it's one the late nineteenth century—with its early eugenic theories of 'criminal type' and hereditary criminality, and its somewhat-reformed but still horrifically harsh justice system—badly needed to hear. And there are plenty of complex criminals amongst the minor characters who Tom meets in prison, amongst the bushrangers and in the chain-gang.
This was all very interesting, but it sat rather uncomfortably alongside some of the other stuff in the book. It's spoiler time...
( Drama and plot twists below )
The Rogue's March is quite a bit longer and much more ambitious than anything Hornung had written before, and if it doesn't always seem perfectly clear about where those ambitions are going, it was still a very interesting and enjoyable read. Once again recommended for those interested in the literary currents leading towards the Raffles stories...
