A Treacherous Country is this year's winner of the Vogel Award for an unpublished manuscript, and it's a promising debut for its author K M (Kate) Kruimink.
When the story begins, Gabriel is in the company of a shaggy Irishman he calls his Cannibal, en route from Hobart to a failed whaling station, which his escort wants him to buy (because in forty years the whales have been harvested almost to extinction). Gabriel has arrived from Sydney where he gambled away everything he had in exchange for some possibly useless American harpoons, only to be conned into buying a stolen horse, which is subsequently stolen from him in turn. He seems a nice young man, but gullible to a fault, and not just because he has fallen victim to skulduggery. He has journeyed across the world on a quest is to find Maryanne Maginn, transported some 25 years beforehand, to please the guardian of his lady love, and thus to win her hand.

As it turns out, he is deluded about that, and everything else as well.

Kruimink lives in the Huon Valley, and her familiarity with the Tasmanian landscape gives her prose a bleak authenticity:

The sun did not rise, but instead presented as the suffusion of light behind thick cloud, like a flame behind a paper screen. There was a complete lack of shadow and variety. Everything about me glowed with equal import or insignificance, depending upon one's point of view, and whether one was an optimist or not. Ringlets of fog like girls' hair were emerging from the trees and coiling down the bank.

Nobody knows where I am, I thought. Nobody who loves me knows where I am.

Rather freeing, really. (p.69)

Alas for Gabriel, this freedom leads him to take part in a whale hunt (which I did not enjoy reading, for the same reasons I disliked Moby Dick, but the chapter is mercifully short, which Moby Dick is not). He barely escapes with his life. His companion Cook does not, but back on dry land, in Mrs Heron's modest house, Gabriel's reflections on his experience are rather droll...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/05/15/a-treacherous-country-by-k-m-kruimink-2020-v... ( )