![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeIn 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...
While all the above is taking place, the mystery of who actually committed that murder remains unresolved. The reader knows, but Tom doesn't, who his benefactor is: Daintree, a friend of Tom's sweetheart Claire who falls in love with her, gets a bit, um, Nice Guy about it, and decides that to win her love he will help Tom (she pretends that she's interested in the case because she hates the victim, hiding her relationship with the accused!). Well, at the end it turns out that Daintree was the murderer all along; he gets his just deserts and Tom and Claire get their happy ending.
But the presentation of Daintree seems to undercut all the stuff I talked about above: he's portrayed as a madman (who's just very good at hiding it), and his murderousness as a fixed part of his nature. After the murder is revealed he breaks down, and the description of his desperate rage ends with the explicit judgement that 'inherent mania had claimed its own'. There's little sympathy or nuance. I suppose the intended lesson here was that the real villains aren't always who you'd think to look at them or who society judges them to be, and I appreciated the implied point about men who don't respect women's wishes, but it was an interesting and rather uncomfortable contrast to the events of earlier in the book.
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...
While all the above is taking place, the mystery of who actually committed that murder remains unresolved. The reader knows, but Tom doesn't, who his benefactor is: Daintree, a friend of Tom's sweetheart Claire who falls in love with her, gets a bit, um, Nice Guy about it, and decides that to win her love he will help Tom (she pretends that she's interested in the case because she hates the victim, hiding her relationship with the accused!). Well, at the end it turns out that Daintree was the murderer all along; he gets his just deserts and Tom and Claire get their happy ending.
But the presentation of Daintree seems to undercut all the stuff I talked about above: he's portrayed as a madman (who's just very good at hiding it), and his murderousness as a fixed part of his nature. After the murder is revealed he breaks down, and the description of his desperate rage ends with the explicit judgement that 'inherent mania had claimed its own'. There's little sympathy or nuance. I suppose the intended lesson here was that the real villains aren't always who you'd think to look at them or who society judges them to be, and I appreciated the implied point about men who don't respect women's wishes, but it was an interesting and rather uncomfortable contrast to the events of earlier in the book.
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...
