Review: The Silk Merchant’s Son, Peter Burke

Historical fiction’s mission and responsibility: to entertain while telling stories that need and deserve to be told; to reflect the experiences of people who should not be forgotten; to shine lights into dark corners; and to compel the reader to a level of emotional buy-in on these things that plain history books cannot.

Perth author and doctor Peter Burke hits every mark with this subtle novel full of both pathos and a distinctive wit: somehow gentle and sharp all at once.

West Australian history is his métier, his previous books of fiction and nonfiction illuminating the state’s deserving yet little-known characters and settings.

Historical fiction not being one of my usual areas of expertise, I was unfamiliar with Burke until I had the privilege to sit alongside him at an event heralding new books recently, and the wry humour laced through his reading convinced me to pick his up.

Opening the book swept me instantly to Lyon, France, 1845, where the long-suffering parents of Fabrice Cleriquot – a man of tastes very questionable to that time –despatch him to the Swan River Colony, clutching a box full of silkworms, silk being the family’s trade.

The Elizabeth voyage is primarily for 28 mismatched and misguided Catholic missionaries, and the Irish Sisters of Mercy, fleeing famine.

Cleriquot’s job among them is ostensibly distributing to them a huge donation from a wealthy benefactress to the mission, as they are not to be trusted with the funding directly. In reality, Cleriquot’s parents just want to get him out of the way for a while and stop him bringing more disgrace upon them.

Among the missionaries he joins is Dom Salvado, who seeks to create a Spanish Benedictine monastery deep in the bush, at the place we now know as New Norcia. Here, Fabrice bears witness to the folly of his travelling companions whose presumptuous attempts to rescue the colony and the original inhabitants from themselves can only lead to tragedy.

This setting – a place, time and society so near to ours and yet so profoundly far – is at once intimately known and infinitely strange.

Burke’s first challenge is to tell a story that covers a huge geographical and temporal range, taking in at once the Great Famine in Ireland, the French Revolution and the first Italian War of Independence as well as the lengthening of the tentacles of the Swan Valley Colony through the areas of Toodyay and New Norcia, over a period of several years.

He must also retain the vital aspect of human interest that will sustain the reader’s aforementioned emotional buy-in, despite this scale and the necessarily huge cast.

To further complicate things, religious history dictates this cast has names that are unfamiliar, complex and minimally differentiated – a reader’s and novelist’s nightmare both, and yet skilfully managed.

Also deftly handled is the weaving of real historical characters with those invented for the purpose of a plot that rarely flags for all its size and scope.

Burke’s second challenge is to reflect the extremely provocative story of New Norcia and its interactions with First Nations peoples without any special wisdom, as the author himself puts it, other than to suggest that “we should all be judged according to the context of the times in which we live”, and to recognise that good intentions can be as harmful as malicious ones.

This is a scholarly book that wears its research lightly through deceptively simple prose: unadorned yet splendidly, quietly, refreshingly humorous. It is also poignant and full of empathy for all its characters, wherever they hail from. There is a sense of controlled anger at the darkest subject matters – the removal of young Indigenous children from their ancestral lands to places in Italy they had no hope of understanding or belonging in – but the story is, for all its darkness, unfailingly hopeful.

This is a novel I am glad I chanced upon, leaving me full of respect for its author and full of sympathy for its characters.

Lovers of general historical fiction, humour, Indigenous history, or those with a special interest in the areas of Toodyay and Moore River or the history of the Swan River Colony, will find it a rich and rewarding read.

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