These are poor words to describe how I felt when I read about the land working its magic on a grubby, insensitive fellow from London, and then his dawning dismay when he realises that the indigenous owners of that land felt as he did. Her central character, William Thornhill, a convict whose life experiences made him the most pragmatic of men, is lured into an almost spiritual love for a patch of land on the Hawkesbury River. Not an acquisitive, greedy love of land, but rather a feeling of being entranced by its beauty. Even now, some years after I read it, I can still recall the rapt attention I gave to Grenville’s prose describing the love of land in The Secret River. The Lieutenant is a deeply satisfying book, even though it perhaps lacks that elusive quality which made The Secret River so very special.
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