For pure pleasure I have recently been reading the travel essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, in particular “Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes,” a wonderful account of the author’s wanderings in the wilds of northern France during the autumn of 1878. It was a time when traveling often meant simply setting off. Not very far, in many cases, perhaps only to the next valley or county where strange customs awaited discovery.
By contrast, the Australian novelist Kate Grenville transports her historical characters far beyond their known world - and often beyond their comprehension - to the shores of her own continent. In “The Secret River,” Grenville set an English convict and his family adrift in the colony of New South Wales in 1806. Now in “The Lieutenant,” she recreates an earlier alienation, that of Daniel Rooke, a young English astronomer and Royal Navy lieutenant who arrives in New South Wales with the First Fleet and a shipment of convicts in 1788. (Rooke’s adventures are based on those of William Dawes, the English soldier and scientist who documented the language of the aboriginal people he encountered.)
“His Majesty had just acquired a plot double the size of France, Spain and Germany combined,” Rooke notes as the newly minted governor declares sovereignty over the land and its natives. The fact interests Rooke only in passing and purely as a fact. A mathematical and linguistic prodigy with a miserable boyhood behind him, the astronomer craves only solitude and the stars. Rooke’s makeshift observatory outside the settlement provides both, and there he watches for a predicted comet, one that could make his name.
Grenville’s portrait of the obtuse yet engaging Rooke and her descriptions of this strange territory are marvelously evocative. “On the northern shore, high dark prows of headlands hung over the water, the sombre woods pressing down into their own reflections,” she writes. The brooding land seems to be waiting, as we are, for the inevitable clash: between the convicts and their jailers, between the colonists and the native people, or between Rooke and the reality to which he is largely oblivious.
“Language was a machine . . . each part had to be understood in relation to all the other parts,” Rooke observes as he and a young aboriginal girl, Tagaran, tentatively begin to trade the words and phrases that will eventually constitute his dictionary of Tagaran’s language. The fragility of these encounters further heightens the suspense that Grenville so deftly sustains. Tragedy looms, of course, just outside the delicate frame of this elegiac novel, but Grenville allows us to marvel at “one universe in the act of encountering another” even as we dread the inevitable result.
Another young scientist, Daniel Connor, narrates Rebecca Stott’s jaunty new novel, “The Coral Thief,” which, like “The Lieutenant,” depicts the education of an innocent. In this case, however, the education is not moral but romantic. “Desire was there from the beginning,” Daniel recalls of the mysterious woman he meets on his journey to Paris in 1815. Napoleon has just been defeated at Waterloo, the victorious allies are carting off France’s art treasures, and Daniel is transporting rare fossils to his new mentor in Paris. But his academic ambitions are soon eclipsed by his passion for Lucienne Bernard, a “philosopher-thief” and revolutionary who lures Daniel into a plot that involves a daring theft and that takes him underground into the labyrinths and quarries that lie beneath the city.
Just as Stott’s previous novel “Ghostwalk” taught us much about 17th-century England and Sir Isaac Newton, so “The Coral Thief” folds into its lively plot many of the political, philosophical, and scientific debates of 19th-century France. Even Napoleon himself is slyly incorporated, appearing in lyrically rendered, melancholy scenes that relieve the galloping narrative and that chart the emperor’s voyage to St. Helena. “Be it so,” Napoleon says when he learns his destination. “On this desolate rock we will write our memoirs. We must be employed - occupation is the scythe of time.”
Such grandiose pronouncements are largely avoided by faithful imitators of Jane Austen, the latest among them being the mother and daughter team of Jane Rubino and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway. In “Lady Vernon and Her Daughter,” the authors have taken as their starting point Austen’s novella “Lady Susan,” which was written in the mid-1790s and probably wisely discarded. This Rubino-Bradway reworking, much of it explicated in letters, depicts the trials and triumphs of the newly widowed Lady Vernon and her sensitive daughter, Frederica, as they navigate the booby-trapped terrain where familial, legal, and romantic concerns merge. Society, in other words. Like any worthwhile pastiche, this entertaining novel prompts a renewed appreciation of the subtlety and wit of the real Jane Austen, who would never have had a character say “. . . everything is all about money!” even when it was.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached by e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com. 
