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I know that authors must write the books they feel impelled to write, but as I put the book down at the end of my reading, I thought that this could have been a more compelling book if Tom Keneally had focussed his attention differently in this novel, Napoleon’s Last Island…

According to the prologue, (mischievously entitled ‘Terre Napoléon’ which was the name bestowed on Australia’s southern coast by the French explorer Nicolas Baudin), Keneally became intrigued by the story of Betsy Balcombe when he visited the Napoleon exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Some of the memorabilia was credited to Betsy Balcombe, who had lived on the Mornington Peninsula and whose descendants had inherited the relics.  This novel is his story of the relationship between 14 year-old Betsy and Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) when they were neighbours on the island of St Helena in the southern Atlantic where Napoleon was exiled.

Now, as it happens, I am simultaneously reading Xavier Herbert’s chunkster Poor Fellow My Country and yesterday (before I read the concluding chapters of Napoleon’s Last Island), I came across a scene in which a character at a social occasion meets the British General who commanded his brother’s last fatal day at Gallipoli.  Jeremy Delacy, characterised as an inherently reasonable man normally of great restraint, can’t control his rising rage, and decks the General, who his brother had described in a letter as a ‘homicidal maniac’ who cared nothing for the fate of the men.  The two books came together in my imagination when I considered what it might be like to have custody of the Emperor whose ambitions caused 65000 casualties at the Battle of Waterloo alone, 17000 of whom were British.  I thought of the treatment of Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević in our own time, and of the Nuremburg Trials and the Tokyo Trials.  The desire to force retribution for great wrongs can very easily become vengeance.  The very human story of the British soldiers guarding Napoleon could have been a much more powerful story than the one that Keneally has written in Napoleon’s Last Island. 

Instead what we have through Betsy’s empathetic narration is a sympathetic portrait of Napoleon, and her interpretation of his most emphatic gaoler,  Sir Hudson Lowe, as petty-minded.  Because the house chosen as Napoleon’s residence, ‘Longwood’ isn’t ready, Napoleon becomes neighbour to the Balcombes while he temporarily lodges in a pavilion nearby their home, named ‘The Briars’.  At first Betsy is afraid of him, calling him the Ogre, but she warms to him, and being of a wilful and capricious nature, she charms him with her cheeky behaviour.

Admiral Cockburn, when waiting on the arrival of their prisoner, says that he knows their ‘visitor’s features very well’ but under the affable governorship of Captain Mark Wilks (who presides over St Helena’s role as a centre for the slave trade), retribution is mild.  They have chosen Longwood as the most uncongenial residence on the island.  They insist (with some humour) that Napoleon never be addressed as Emperor or Majesty but rather as General.  Provisions for his household are generous (which suits Betsy’s father well since he is the Superintendent of Public Sales for the East India Company and he supplies the island with produce). And from the first, Betsy’s sympathies are engaged.  ‘It was a heartbreaking scene, his sauntering to his camp bed in the pavilion.   No wife with him, no son’. (p.81)

Her family becomes more close to their notable neighbour than the authorities would like.  Napoleon had, after all, resurrected his ambitions with a previous escape from exile on the island of Elba and they are watchful for escape conspiracies.  The island has been under the control of the East India Company but the British Government decides to increase its precautions.  Before long Governor Wilks is replaced in 1816 by the more punitive Hudson Lowe, nicknamed Name and Nature by the witty Betsy, because he is Lowe by Name and Lowe by Nature.  With vice-regal power never before issued to the island’s administration, he cuts the budget for provisions, he ramps up the garrison, he scrutinises everyone’s mail and purchases and is overbearing and officious as well.  (According to Wikipedia, there was a garrison of 820 men and Royal Navy ships circled the island.  It also says that Lowe took some small steps towards emancipating slaves).

Lowe’s scrutiny of Balcombe reveals some ‘indiscretions’ and the Balcombes are packed off to Britain – and the story fizzles out a bit after that.  I have to say that the novel was never really very engaging anyway, except in terms of triggering thinking about what it might have been.  There is an allusion, for example, to the Pope’s magnanimous treatment of Napoleon’s mother despite himself having been held captive by Napoleon.  Betsy notes this, but limited by her (albeit precocious) 14-year-old perspective does not ponder the personal cost to the Pope.  What motivated this magnanimity?  How does politics interfere with human emotion?  Do those soldiers garrisoned on a bleak island in the middle of nowhere feel sorry for Boney too, or do they feel resentment about his existence?  In the small world of the British military, were there some among the islanders who felt the same ungovernable rage that made Jeremy Delacy in Poor Fellow My Country avenge his brother’s unnecessary death?

If put aside my discontents and attend to the novel as it is, Napoleon’s Last Island is still an unsatisfactory story.  There is too much padding in this novel, too much repetition of Betsy’s really not-very-interesting escapades, too much of her unvarying opinions, too much of her character assassination of Lowe, and too much of what she thinks is her own cleverness and wit.  There is a very silly episode involving what I assume is an invented sexual escapade and an even sillier explanation thereof to the teenage Betsy who witnessed it.  At 426 pages it is much too long, leading to the suspicion that Keneally’s research plus his imagination both needed reining in.

Meredith Jaffe, however, at The Guardian thought it was brilliant, Peter Pierce at The Australian was impressed, but Phillip Dwyer at the SMH had some doubts though he thought it was generally entertaining.  (Beware: there is a spoiler in his review, one which I have meticulously avoided).

©Lisa Hill

Author: Tom Keneally
Title: Napoleon’s Last Island
Publisher: Vintage (Random House/Penguin), 2015
ISBN: 9780857984616
Source: personal copy, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh, $32.99

Available from Fishpond: Napoleon’s Island