By Ross Southernwood
FICTION
Resolution
A. N. WILSON
ATLANTIC BOOKS, $29.99
For those familiar with 18th-century voyages of maritime exploration and discovery, the name and cover of this novel would suggest James Cook's second voyage to the southern hemisphere between 1772 and 1775. And they would be right – but only partly.
Resolution by A.N. Wilson.
A.N. Wilson's book is about much more than the great voyage, which included Polynesia, New Zealand, Easter Island and Antarctic waters, and Cook is only a support player. The protagonist is George Forster, a young German, who with his father, Reinhold, was aboard HMS Resolution throughout: George, a budding naturalist and the expedition's artist; Reinhold, its naturalist – both were real people.
The prolific British novelist and popular historian structures Resolution in parts and years. For example, part one opens aboard the Resolution in 1772, later jumping to 1784 and George's approaching marriage. Yet even within the various parts and signalled years, time also moves back and forth. This can be frustrating early on, but you eventually fall into its rhythm. Also, you might see it as symbolising George's varied life and the changing times he lives in.
Although George remains the narrative's physical and felt centre, as far as the voyage is concerned, we fully experience, appreciate and revel in its epic nature and witness Cook and others in action. As the Resolution sails on, we can well appreciate how exciting and wondrous, to those British and European eyes, visits to the South Pacific islands would have been.
Polynesia, with its open-hearted and fraternising young women, is perhaps one of the most memorable. It is here that George, whose youthful sexual frustration is apparent, becomes smitten by one such girl but, alas, a relationship fails to ensue.
The sheer rigour and danger of Resolution's ventures into Antarctic waters comes vividly alive through Wilson's pen, sitting at ease with Patrick O'Brian's descriptions of those freezing climes in his grand Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sea-going series. Throughout his tale, Wilson employs an apt stroke by beginning each part with an appropriate quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The non-voyage sequences deal with George's life: born in Prussia in 1754 but later, as a youngster, moving with his family to England, and, most importantly, his post-Resolution life on the Continent, with the Enlightenment now in full swing. This encompasses his developing intellectual life as a naturalist, ethnologist, writer – particularly his account of the voyage – lecturer and translator, achievements that bring fame on this exalted plane.
However, George's personal life is at times as bumpy as a rough sea, due to an increasingly uneasy relationship with his father, a tragic end to his friendship with his and Reinhold's servant on the Resolution, Nally, and his troubled, unsatisfactory and cuckolded marriage to Therese Heyne.
Like him she is highly intelligent, an exemplar of the emerging "new woman" of the Enlightenment, and is one the novel's most interesting characters. Yet they just don't gel. Indeed, one monumental row between them puts Edward Albee's George and Martha in the shade.
The most dramatic sequences of the novel concern George's involvement with the French Revolution, in which he becomes, at first unknowingly, enmeshed in espionage on Britain's behalf while at the same time a quasi-official of the new regime. By now, the revolution has degenerated from its noble ideals at its birth in 1789 to the bloody Terror.
In covering noteworthy 18th-century events Wilson delivers a historical novel of high interest and importance, and one anchored by a remarkable yet generally little-known man in George Forster. Hopefully, this work will help change that by encouraging a wider interest.