Kline is a serious researcher and a vivid storyteller. I don’t know how you prettify rat-infested dungeons with prisoners sharing the same space, or rapes, or the fevered condition of typhoid and other diseases rampant at the time.
We taste the inedible slop served to prisoners, smell every ounce of human waste excreted, feel the pain of whips on our flesh and, most of all, rebel at the de-humanizing condescension of one people to another.Ī few of the early reviewers with advance copies of “The Exiles” bristled at the degree of detail in Kline’s depiction of cruelty and suffering, particularly inside Newgate. Kline tells their stories with relentless detail and tests our capacity to endure the most wretched of human conditions. The third major character is not a transported prisoner but the aboriginal daughter of a chieftain who, left to her own fledgling devices, manages to survive in the bush with her wherewithal and cunning instincts only to become the pet of the ruling English overlord and wife, and turned into a domestication experiment. The estranged daughter of a midwife, she creates her own barter business by trading her learned apothecarial skills for services and tools from other prisoners and sailors.
Then there is Hazel, a Scottish teenager sentenced to seven years for stealing a silver spoon. One principal is a naïve English governess who’s seduced by her employer’s son, discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate English prison on phony charges, where she’s tagged as a candidate for transport to Australia. A total of 32,000 of the 160,000 English prisoners were women. She uses her characters to tell the story of England’s treatment of Australia as one giant hoosegow by shipping its “incorrigibles” there from 1788 to 1868. Kline takes full advantage of fiction - its freedom to create compelling characters who fully illuminate monumental events to make history accessible and forever etched in our minds. In her latest novel, “The Exiles,” Kline steers us through the Anglophilic diaspora of the 19th century in a journey to Australia through the lens of three women - all forcibly taken from their places of origin to shape lives under the most challenging of circumstances. I came upon this in an article linked to Christina Baker Kline’s website. It can tell the story of ordinary people.” SOMESVILLE, Maine - The historian Jill Lepore wrote, “Fiction can do what history doesn’t but should.
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