Arabella Edge (photo by Nick Gaze)
fiction
MACABRE AND DERANGED
Robert Drewe
Arabella Edge
The Company: The Story of a Murderer
Picador $32.90hb, 371pp
0 330 36220 8
Arabella Edge (photo by Nick Gaze)
THE MACABRE EVENTS and deranged characters described in The Company, Arabella Edge's impressive first novel, are familiar to most West Australians but, like much that happens on Australia's Indian Ocean coast or, indeed, anywhere west of Adelaide, they are barely known in the insouciant east.
Edge's publishers may have been aware of, or even counting on, that eastern obliviousness because this handsome-looking book has a drum-rolling, news-breaking air about it. Fair enough; the tale of the Batavia, the treasure-laden flagship of the Dutch East India Company of the title, which foundered in the Abrolhos islands in 1629, is a juicy one even by today's elevated serial-killer standards. In the crazed apothecary Jeronimus Cornelisz, the Charles Manson-like figure who assumes command of the shipwrecked survivors and then leads his followers into the massacre of more than one hundred and twenty of them, writers of both history and fiction have a ready-made scene-stealer.
The Batavia-Cornelisz story has long been retold by historical writers such as Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Hugh Edwards, Philippe Godard and Rupert Gerritsen. It also inspired Nicholas Hasluck's chilling and complex 1984 novel, The Bellarmine Jug. It's the star feature of the WA Maritime Museum at Fremantle, which has displayed skeletal remains, Batavia wreckage and artefacts for several decades. But if you thought the Batavia story was picked clean The Company proves otherwise.
Edge concentrates on Cornelisz's point of view -- and it's a sly, seductive and mostly convincing one that she creates for him. As a spoiled child of Amsterdam's decadent Golden Age, Cornelisz is given a psychological background worthy of the FBI's serial killer profilers: an overwhelming ego, early cruelty towards animals, a sadistic servant-rutting-and-whipping father, a fey, religious mother, and, as mentor, the voluptuary and would-be Satan, Torrentius, he of the masked balls, zodiac charts, tarot cards and library of curiosa, including The History of the Flagellants which naturally catches the young Cornelisz's fancy.
A keen interest in chemistry, particularly the poison cupboard, more or less completes his education. A decade later, having despatched most of his household with a plate of stewed apples, and offended the Calvinist magistrates of the town with his licentious behaviour, the thirty-year-old apothecary flees on the Batavia with a forged ticket and his poison and opium phials, bound for the East Indies and -- with the assistance of a malign Fate -- his historic role as mass-murderer and, incidentally, Australia's first pharmacist.
It should be said immediately that Arabella Edge has managed the first-person male voice with great finesse. The character whose mind she invades might be a seventeenth- century psychopath, but she makes him beguilingly familiar. While she credits Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches and C.R. Boxer's The Dutch Seaborne Empire for her backgrounding in the Dutch Golden Age, and the previously mentioned histories for the events surrounding the Batavia, the novel wears its research lightly. It could have easily bogged down in the sumptuousness of upper-class Amsterdam or in the litany of atrocities in the Abrolhos (which as well as out-and-out slaughter featured torture, rape, infanticide and cannibalism). With this sort of material less is definitely more and Edge's subtlety enhances her narrative's suspense. The Company is a real page-turner.
With historical novels, especially first-person ones, the challenge is to get the language, dialogue and inner thoughts not just right but acceptable. Edge walks the necessary fine line between period accuracy and the modern reader's impatience with archaism. Her writing is lively and evocative. Once she gets her character away from Amsterdam's astrakhan cloaks, marshmallow ointments and crocus vendors with louche smiles and into the hot winds of the Antipodes, where 'everywhere sand blows fine as flour', her narrative sings and sings.
When the Batavia is wrecked, Cornelisz begins stealthily and cunningly to reduce the survivors' numbers. At first there is a logic, however evil, to his plans: on their off-shore island water is scarce. But by the sixth day, when 'calm skies and seas meet in an equal line of eggshell blue' his schemes are becoming more grandiose. He forms a gang of followers out of the 'drunken group of corporate boys', those young men from the Dutch East Indian Company accompanying the Company's payroll to the East Indies. The author brings some twenty-first century scorn to her picture of Australia's first yuppies, 'offspring of buccaneers and opportunists, raised in opulent waterfront mansions', whose randy, boisterous arrogance, at first hardly more off-putting than any contemporary Friday night at a Sydney sharetraders' bar, is gradually manipulated by Cornelisz's guile and flattery into something debauched and murderous. Their bloodlust is up. He is already planning for his 'boys' to murder the crew of the anticipated rescue ship as well. Then with Batavia's salvaged corporate treasures stashed in the hold, he and his band will sail away on a dream. As he muses:
Give me one lost empire on a cartographer's map, plotted on hope and chance trade winds. Crown me King, carry me triumphant on your shoulders to a canvas castle, set me down on a throne of straw, hand me a wooden sceptre and your signatures in blood and I will appoint you my chosen ones.
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Return to Australian Book Review /September 2000