4★
The author explains: “I have focused on a socially narrow stratum of early colonial Australia, and neglected the blood and the gore, the pain and the suffering, that became the dominant metaphor for colonial Australia.
. . .
I have attempted to say something true about Australian history, or at least to challenge an abiding falsehood — the vision of the first gulag — with that of a social revolution.”

The author says he woke one morning hearing a woman’s voice saying she'd paid the boatman with a bag of cherries, but he had no idea where the voice or thought came from. He’s built an entire novel around that inspiration, and it’s a pretty good read.

Another intriguing inspiration he mentions in the note at the end was his own personal love triangle as a model for the one between Macquarie, Mrs M and the Architect.

I have to say, for a man, he gets into the mind of Mrs M very well. To me, she thinks and sounds like a woman of her time. She’s headstrong and smart but also a bit of a charmer and a flirt. The tension between the three of them is very well done. [I suspect HE may have been the Mrs M in his own life story, but don’t mind me – just a guess. And I don’t think that had anything to do with his expressing her personality so well, either.]

This is not historical fiction, in the usual sense of the term. Slattery has taken real people and completely fabricated a yearning infatuation between them. The author says there is much truth in the historical setting, but the relationships are made up. So you can enjoy it as a romance, which is really what it is, and pick up a bit of Australian history while you’re at it. Lots of good characters and side stories.

This takes place in the early 1800s during Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s time presiding over the convicts, soldiers and emancipated members of the young Sydney colony. His much younger wife, Elizabeth, was with him, and Francis Greenway was, indeed, the convict architect (the Architect) who designed so many of Sydney’s well-known buildings. The three of them oversaw the changes from a penal colony to a thriving community.

But the author takes pains to explain in his note and in an interview I heard that he has invented the sighs and long glances and covert meetings between the wife and the Architect. That’s the fun of the story, of course. His descriptions of the birds and bush and of the windswept Scottish islands are lovely. [ I’m just not moved by unruly curls escaping bonnets or eucalyptus eyes smiling , old fogey that I am.]

Most Sydneysiders are aware of and may have visited Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, a large stone seat carved from rock in The Domain on the south side of Sydney Harbour. The novel has it that the Architect fashioned it and that she felt a strong connection to him when she was there reading and gazing out to sea, which was often. That last part seems to be true, but probably not thinking about him. Still, makes for a good story, eh?

“He has been as good as his word. My promised chair is now complete. Rather more bench than chair, it requires a few cushions for perfect comfort, though nothing more than that. Commanding a fine view of the harbour, my retreat is shaded by a fig tree twisting into a parasol of dense dark leaves, some of which turn persimmon yellow in dry weather.

Governor Macquarie was many years her senior and was often busy fighting off political foes who thought he was far too easy on the convicts and Aborigines and hard on the soldiers. They wanted all the power and glory for themselves

His view was that the convicts who were later freed were the powerhouse that was building the country. They were so anxious to better themselves and improve their lot that they worked harder than the soldiers. He acknowledged that the Aborigines had been dispossessed and that the newcomers needed the indigenous skills and experience to survive in this very different land. The soldiers were not always thrilled with their Antipodean posting and I wonder how much it cost to keep them in rum.

The political argybargy, to use the technical term, sounds a lot like today’s. Disagreement on how best to manage ‘jobs and growth” and whom to trust. Not much changes.

An interesting aside about Greenway, courtesy of Wikipedia:

“Greenway's face was shown on the first Australian decimal-currency $10 note (1966–93), making him probably the only convicted forger in the world to be honoured on a banknote.”

If I have a reservation about this, it’s that I worry that people will eventually believe the love story along with the historical facts. The affair often portrayed between Elizabeth the First and Essex, for example, had a lot of evidence to support the rumours, whereas Mrs M and the Architect is more of a “what if?” imagining. But it's an entertaining one.

I think this will find a lot of fans, and I thank NetGalley and HarperCollins for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted.