One of the most interesting things about author Heather Rose is how different each of her novels are, in genre, scope and interests. Her best-known novel, 2016’s The Museum of Modern Love, is a defiantly literary work, centres on Marina Abramovic’s performance art and the people who watch it; her follow-up, 2019’s Bruny, is part spy thriller and part speculative fiction. She has also written crime fiction, a coming-of-age novel and a modern fable.
A Great Act of Love represents another genre shift, blending historical fiction with high adventure and romance. The novel follows Caroline Colbert, who has reinvented herself as the wealthy widow Mrs Douglas as she arrives in Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land in the late 1830s and establishes herself in a cottage with a disused vineyard, determined to bring it back into production. Her father, Jacques-Louis, who spent his childhood working in the champagne vineyards of Louis XIV, is serving time as a convict on Norfolk Island – and Caroline believes her endeavour may just offer up a chance to save him.
A Great Act of Love was inspired by Rose’s family history, including a recent archival discovery that complicated and also darkened the family’s past. Accordingly, the novel is most interested in how history is told and received across generations, as well as early colonists’ predilection for self-reinvention – and what this means for the people who come after.
It is difficult to approach A Great Act of Love without some trepidation. There are so many complex ethical decisions involved in writing about white family histories in this era, especially in dealing with an ancestor’s implication and participation in colonial violence. And Rose’s recent track record is not unproblematic as far as racialised ethical decisions are concerned: the plot of her novel Bruny has been criticised for trading on white settler-colonial anxieties of an Asian invasion, and portraying many of its Chinese characters as inscrutable.
A Great Act of Love sidesteps some of the thorniest territory by opening with Caroline’s arrival in Van Diemen’s Land in 1839, after the worst of the frontier violence against the island’s Aboriginal people – including the notorious Black War – has occurred. But Caroline is very aware of how this violence and the Indigenous population’s dispossession is the basis of her new existence, and sensitive to what has been lost, in part because her voyage to Australia brought her into contact with recent stories of Indigenous dispossession and genocide from other parts of the world. Mostly, though, the novel’s awareness of colonial violence occurs in the background and through secondary characters, such as the blacksmith Cornelius, who has escaped slavery by sailing to Van Diemen’s Land, and who, for a time, maintained relationships with a local Aboriginal tribe.
Rose’s central concern in A Great Act of Love is more circumscribed: the brutality and violence that have shaped the life of Caroline’s father, and by extension, Caroline’s own. Jacques-Louis is imprisoned in a place notorious for the misery and mistreatment endured by its convict population, having already survived bloody revolution, displacement and occupational injury. This haunts Caroline. She also thinks deeply about the degradation she witnesses in convict work gangs and the sexual violence perpetrated against transported women.
Rose reveals the acts and forces of violence in Caroline’s and Jacques-Louis’ pasts slowly, in a series of flashbacks that are interspersed throughout the main narrative. These are masterfully handled – they are suspenseful and unfold piecemeal, always complicating the reader’s understanding of these characters and the circumstances that have shaped them.
These flashbacks are also where A Great Act of Love performs much of its bending of genre: they are full of tension and revelation, no small amount of dashing adventure, and tragedy and melodrama as well. They disturb the realist veneer that Rose maintains across the main narrative, and allow her to take greater imaginative leaps and play with the limits of plausibility in a manner that is always interesting, if not always entirely successful.
A Great Act of Love is, at its heart, a redemption story, and a story about reinvention. It is compelling largely because of its continual overlaying of revelations about the past on top of Caroline’s establishment of her new life.
It is also a novel that pays close attention to the natural world – Rose’s descriptions of the landscape of Hobart are one of the real pleasures of the book.
Importantly, it is not a novel that ever claims to be a history; instead, it is interested in how history is told or lost. And while Rose’s shifts in genre and attachment to her characters do mean it occasionally veers into sentimentality, the complexity and ambition of its project make it a very compelling read.
A Great Act of Love by Heather Rose is out through Allen & Unwin ($34.99)
