The Exiles: Good but Not Transcedent

 

THE EXILES (2020)

By Cristina Baker Kline

HarperCollins, 384 pages.

★★★

 

In her latest work, Christina Baker Kline returns to a subject that has interested her in the past: orphans. It is set in the 1840s, the height of British imperialism and a time in which the slightest infraction led draconian judges to impose exile sentences to ill-begotten colonies. Said judges were seldom moved by the age or circumstances of the accused.

 

Evangeline is an intelligent preacher’s daughter who became a governess when her father died when she was still a minor. How many Victorian novels involve rakish sons of privilege ruining a trusting female? So too this one, whose only twist is that a stepson is the culprit. In the eyes of English law, Evangeline’s word is no good when leveled against a prominent family, so it’s exile to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).  

 

Aboard the transport ship she meets pickpocket Hazel Ferguson, the daughter of an absent alcoholic mother. Her skills as an herbalist and midwife also make her suspicious in the eyes of the ship’s crew, though physician Dr. Caleb Dunne is impressed by her. Also on board is salty-tongued Olive, who is with child. It is implied that she was a prostitute. Post for present status scarcely matters; all the women are viewed as disposable trash. Moreover, a long ocean journey exposed females to danger of physical assault.

 

On the other side of the world, an Aborigine named Matthinna, is taken from her homeland on Flanders Island for no good reason other than that Sir John Franklin of Arctic exploration infamy and his wife wish to undertake a social experiment they believe will fail. They seize a child to see if they can civilize it. The lighter-skinned Matthinna is chosen because she’s not “too” black as to be irredeemable. She too is bound for Van Diemen’s Land, where Franklin is governor.

 

One of the more fascinating details of the novel involves the little-known aftermath for those exiled from England. Did you know exiles were jailed when they went ashore? They had to earn their way to freedom (of a sort) in a place where European men vastly outnumbered women. And remember the time period. The idea of a woman earning her own bread was not impossible, just mostly so.

 

For a time, Matthinna fares better. She lives amidst luxury, though she’d rather be with her own people. She is smart enough to know that her ticket home is compliance. Rechristened as Mary, she excels in her studies and deportment. But she still a “black,” as Europeans reference Aboriginals– when they’re being semi-polite. The Franklins use Mary as a French-speaking trained monkey at parties. For Mary, the calculus is simple: Will she play out the game or succumb to hubris?

 

As you might anticipate, the worlds of the ship’s European white girls and that of Matthinna, will collide. The Exiles is a test of the reach of women’s networks under unusual circumstances. The immigrant story is often told in triumphant tones. The usual arc is that the first generation struggles but works hard to leave a solid bequest for their children. Kline knows it’s messier than that. What do words such as success, acceptance, and freedom mean?

 

Kline does her homework but it’s not quite enough to push this novel over the fence that divides good from extraordinary. Several slips mar an otherwise noble effort. First, she builds sympathy for her characters by placing them in her peril’s way. That’s effective, but she often resorts to melodramatic moments of double Kleenex sentimentality. Kline also breaks historical character in places. This introduces anachronistic contaminants in which characters act as if they are plucked from the 21^st century not the 19^th.

 

This is related to another picked nit. Exiles is an odd mix of imagination and convention. The central protagonists are so compelling that we come to expect much of them. Their flights, though, sometimes thud where they should soar and vice versa. I wonder if Kline realized this as well. Is this why she introduces a vendetta coda set 20 years in the future? It fleshes out several characters, but the device isn’t done with enough nuance to make readers unaware of the author’s intervention.  

 

If these critiques suggest that I lamented reading Exiles, that’s not so. I admire Kline’s work and you will find a glowing review of A Piece of the World in this blog’s archives. It is merely the case that Exiles never surmounted the aforementioned fence. Kline tells her story well, which is a good reason to read it. That it could have been more is a reason not to re-read it.

 

Rob Weir