THE COMPANY

An engrossing debut novel from an English writer now living in Australia, cited as Best First Book in a recent Commonwealth Writers Prize competition.

The story’s based on a historical incident: the wrecking of a Dutch East Indies flagship, the Batavia, on a coral reef off the western coast of Australia in 1629—and also on the real-life figure of Jeronimus Cornelisz, a Dutch apothecary who led a murderous mutiny of shipwreck survivors against others of their fellow passengers and the Batavia’s crew. Edge tells this from the viewpoint of Cornelisz, a serial poisoner who had faked his way on board the ship in order to escape prosecution for his crimes—which are revealed in meditative flashbacks juxtaposed with a spine-tingling episodic account of the survivors’ 40-day ordeal on the nearby Abrolhos Islands. Cornelisz is thus gradually revealed to us as the product of a stunted family environment (his father a brutal sexual predator, his mother a passive religious zealot); the willing student of his Dostoevskyan mentor Torrentius, a wealthy epicurean artist who might have been a crony of Aleister Crowley’s; and a deranged visionary who imagines he has committed evil acts in previous lives (having, for example, delivered Joan of Arc up to her martyrdom). Cornelisz is both a memorable Faustian monster and—in an impressive feat of symbolic suggestion—a nightmarish incarnation of the ruthlessness and avarice at the heart of Dutch mercantile culture (“Trade—what will a man not give in exchange for his soul?”). The scenes in which he manipulates “a drunken group of corporate boys” (the overindulged sons of rich merchants) to do his lethal bidding are rendered even more compelling by the psychotic intricacy of Cornelisz’s crafty self-justifications.

A stimulating mix of Oliver Twist, Lord of the Flies, and two great Australian novels: Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves. And, both because of and despite these echoes, a stunningly original triumph for a brilliant newcomer.