 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
This Thing of Darkness
By Harry Thompson
Review $32.95
 Long-listed
for this year's prestigious Booker Prize, British author Harry Thompson's hefty
work outweighs even the landmark study of evolution, The Origin of Species by
Charles Darwin, one of the two remarkable characters upon whom this novel is based.
The other protagonist is Robert FitzRoy, the patrician seaman who captained
HMS Beagle, the ship on which Darwin journeyed around the southern seas where
his theories about natural selection and the ‘survival of the fittest' would
take shape.
Thompson, a noted television producer whose credits include Da Ali G Show,
has crafted a fine first novel that, sadly, is likely to be his last. At the age
of 45, he has been struck down with inoperable lung cancer, a fate he regards
as an ironic example of Darwinism at work.
‘A month ago I drove around with cricket bats and tennis rackets stationed
permanently in my car,' he wrote in the Sunday Times. ‘Now, a stone lighter,
I never go anywhere without my faithful red plastic bucket' [into which he must
frequently vomit].
FitzRoy's story is just as tragic, for in 1865, nearly four decades after assuming
one of history's most famous captaincies, he cut his throat, ending a life marked
by the profound depression - the ‘thing of darkness' - inherited from his
mother.
The bones of this story have been written many times, but fleshing out the
tale has never been done as imaginatively as in Thompson's novel.
Set in the wild terrain of the Patagonian coast and south Atlantic, at that
time literally uncharted waters, the book's strength lies in the mounting tension
between FitzRoy, a staunchly Christian ‘creationist', and the scientifically-minded
Darwin, who had studied for the clergy.
‘The pair walked out on to the maindeck, sidestepping a huddle of giant
tortoises conspiratorially munching a mound of green leaves, and headed for the
starboard rail, where they stood in silence and drank in the view...'
Later, deciding his research must be published, Darwin tells FitzRoy, ‘Writing
this book feels like confessing to a murder... But I believe, I truly believe
in my heart, that nature's works are blundering, low and horribly cruel, and that
it is my duty to say so.'
The captain replies, ‘If your theories are true, then religion is a lie,
human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice, morality is moonshine... You
will remove the very need for God.'
With creationism now re-badged as ‘intelligent design', the debate continues
to this day.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore and at Lismore Shopping
Square.
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