Arabella Edge: The Company

By ANNE GIBSON

The most macabre character to emerge from Antipodean colonial fiction has been created in this Sydney-based author's impressive, award-winning first novel.

The terrifying Jeronimus Cornelisz is a deranged migrant from Amsterdam's decadent Golden Age, a serial killer whose propensity for cruelty, sadism and violence creates a narrator among the most gruesome in recent literature.

British-born Arabella Edge shared award honours with Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang in last year's Commonwealth Writers Prize for this book, Carey winning the Southeast Asia and South Pacific section, and Edge the best first book. Carey, of course, went on to win the Booker Prize, and Edge was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award.

The parallels between the two books continue: they share the genre of colonial fiction set Down Under.

Both are breathtaking historical novels which sprang from fact, but are enlivened by fiction and the skill of the authors.

Both are narrated by villains, and this tells us as much about the internal workings of the villains' minds as they do about external events.

Both novels use first-person narrative with great finesse, and both authors have Australian associations: Carey left Australia for New York, Edge left Britain for Australia.

The Company also has a New Zealand link. Chris Price, co-ordinator of the New Zealand Festival's Writers and Readers Week, and a past editor of Landfall, was one of the judges who awarded prizes to Carey and Edge last year.

The Company is based on the true story of the Dutch East India flagship the Batavia, wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629 en route to the Indonesian colonies.

The Western Australia Maritime Museum at Fremantle holds artefacts from the ship, which struck a reef and sank, leaving nearly 400 passengers and crew on the deserted Abrolhos Islands.

Cornelisz, exiled from Holland for practising the "dark acts of necromancy", has mutiny, rape, torture and murder on his mind when he steers the treasure-laden ship away from its safe course and assumes command of the unfortunate survivors on the island. What ensues is a chilling meld of Treasure Island and Heart of Darkness with a touch of Lord of the Flies.

The survivors, who thought they were lucky, begin to wish they had gone down with the ship.

The book lurches from one escapade of savagery, degradation and humiliation to another.

But its redemption is in the beguilingly familiar way that Cornelisz speaks to the reader, and the cunning and stealth with which he goes about his murderous endeavours.

Cornelisz' reign of terror lasts 40 days. Edge leaves it to the reader to understand a mind so strange that it lacks the emotional empathy to comprehend the pathos of the situation. What is not said is as important as what is.

The more likeable Ned Kelly, on meeting his end, is said to have muttered, "Such is life." The unhinged Cornelisz remains true to form and, when his time comes, simply screams, "Revenge, revenge!"

Picador

$27.95

* Anne Gibson is a Herald journalist.