A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville review – the untold story of an unruly woman
“Do not believe too quickly!” The epigraph to A Room Made of Leaves issues a warning that resonates throughout the novel, as Kate Grenville invites the reader to reflect on the complex relationship between truth and falsehood, history and fiction.
The phrase is taken from the actual letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the notorious, corrupt early Australian settler John Macarthur. Grenville believes that these letters, sent from Australia to family and friends in England, present carefully constructed, lady-like fictions designed to both conceal and subtly reveal the truth. Who was she, really, Grenville’s novel asks? How did the demure farmer’s daughter from Devon with no substantial fortune wind up with a man so obsessed with his own status and advancement? And what on earth might it have been like to be married to a sociopath like John Macarthur? If Elizabeth had been able to write her own story, what might it say?
Related: What if the wife of a colonial monster had left behind brutally frank secret memoirs?
Unruly women and their untold stories have always fascinated Grenville. The same questions that inspired her debut novel, Lilian’s Story (1985), drive this imagined account of Elizabeth Macarthur’s inner life: how did clever girls, “willful” girls as Elizabeth’s mother calls her, deal with the limitations of conventional femininity, faced with choices that Elizabeth remarks in the novel “were no choices”? How did they manage to rewrite the script, to forge their own individual means of escape, to keep their spirits alive?
A Room Made of Leaves brings these questions together with Grenville’s broader project of unsettling conventional narratives of colonial Australia that began with The Secret River (2005), based on research into her own family history. This turns out to be an uneasy coupling, as the novel tries to balance the happy empowerment of Elizabeth, her flourishing against the odds in a hostile environment, with the inescapable knowledge that the conditions of her flourishing depend on the oppression of others.
The novel concludes with Elizabeth’s assertions of her sense of being at home in Australia, scaffolded by her knowledge that the property she loves is stolen Aboriginal land. The terms of her belonging to the place are beautifully written, insistently eloquent and expressive of connection: “I knew every tree and rock … every shape the water took around the bed of the river at every height of the tide,” she writes. “This land … was connected to me now by a thousand filaments of memory.” At the same time, she sees herself as more of a thief than her convict servant who was transported for stealing. Acknowledgment is presented here as the beginning of redemption: “I am prepared to look in the eye what we have done,” she insists, to admit the “hard truth” of colonial theft and wrong-doing.
How are we to judge these claims? How may we celebrate Elizabeth’s hard-won self-possession, however knowing or regretful, when it is conditional on the violent dispossession of others? It is a complicated balancing act, and feels somehow unresolved — even in a novel that embraces the idea that fiction’s job is to frame questions in new ways and invite engagement, not answer or settle them.
But this does not detract from the stunning literary achievement of the novel. The story unfolds in small chapter-fragments, their short paragraphs packed with gorgeous descriptions of the Australian landscape — “a slice of harbor rough and blue like lapis”, a stone overhang “with a fraying underside, soft as cake, that glowed yellow” — and compressed emotional power. The account of young Elizabeth being “disarmed” by the wordless eloquence of John Macarthur as they gaze at one another from opposite ends of a hallway is a revelatory description of the mechanics of desire, blazing with erotic intensity: “We had but seconds, and he knew how to use them,” she remembers. “He put his hand on his heart with a delicate movement, a caress of himself, fingers spread on his coat, and tilted his head questioningly, submissively, yearningly. How much a person can say by nothing more than a tilt of the head!”
Related: The Australian book you should read next: Her Father's Daughter by Alice Pung | Melanie Cheng
Most striking is the way Grenville makes images startlingly fresh that ought to be worn out with use. She turns inside-out the conventional emblem of birdsong as heartfelt expression, making it expressive only of tragic limitation: as a newly married, unhappy wife, Elizabeth hears a bird that sings “a lovely song” at dawn. “But there was no variation,” she observes; it was “trapped in that one sad utterance. … It might have had everything to say of what it was like to be alive in the hour before the sun rose and life began again. But it had only that one phrase. I imagined the bird weeping its frustration, opening its beak to let out all it knew, and hearing again that parody of what it had in its heart.”
This is one of many images that capture the heartbreaking constraints on female utterance. And there is the wonderful image of a determined gull, observed by Elizabeth and her lover at the end of their affair: “Gulls came. We watched as one dived into the water — with such a smack, it must have hurt — missed its prey, wheeled up, smacked down again, staggered into the air.” Inelegant and ridiculous and graceful at once, so perfectly described as bird and so utterly human.
• A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville is out now through Text
