`Morgan's Run' is history, plus melodrama, romanace

"Morgan's Run"

by Colleen McCullough

Simon & Schuster, $28

Think of Colleen McCullough as the James Cameron of the historical novel. Like the director of "Titanic," the Australian author of the best-selling "Thorn Birds" hews to a formula: schlocky love story superimposed on compelling historic episode equals, with any luck, blockbuster.

Thus "Morgan's Run," McCullough's latest docu-novel, tells the dramatic story of Australia's bumpy start as a penal colony in 1788 from the point of view of an improbably handsome, virtuous, well-muscled, well-educated convict named Richard Morgan.

Don't expect literature: This is a Mills & Boon romance on "The Fatal Shore," with predictably mixed results. The problem is that although the formula sounds a sure-fire thing, it is not that easy to pull off. "Titanic" succeeded partly because the drama of the doomed ship was so contained, so visually arresting and so fortuitously rich in metaphor.

"Morgan's Run," in contrast, takes such a sprawling saga for its plot that McCullough is forced to stop after 600-plus pages with merely a vague pledge of sequels to come. Readers had better be prepared for a long haul, because "Morgan's Run" only gets as far as 1793; the story of eastern Australia's convict beginnings has a good two-thirds of a century to go.

Still, this is the tale of one convict - albeit set against a vast backdrop - so it is only fair to judge it as such. Richard Morgan, according to McCullough's afterword, was a historical figure, in fact a forebear of McCullough's husband. So despite the absence of a bibliography (on the curious grounds that it would be too long), we must assume that at least the skeleton of his story, as told here, is fact.

The son of a Bristol innkeeper, Richard was decently educated, became a master gunsmith, married and had two children; his small family died one after the other, however, of varied causes, while he was still in his 30s. He lost his savings in a scam and became involved as a witness against powerful local rum thieves.

Deranged with grief after his son's drowning, he took up with a treacherous floozy and fell victim to a scheme designed to prevent him from testifying in the rum-poaching case. He was clapped into jail, shipped to Gloucester and, after a travesty of a trial, convicted on a trumped-up charge of extortion and sentenced to be transported - eventually - to the grim tabula rasa of Botany Bay.

Thus the first three of the book's seven long parts. And so far, so maddeningly Hardyesque. Factual or not, this is history as melodrama, each hammer blow of fate heavy-handedly signaled in advance, each turn of the screw drearily anticipated.

Worse, Richard Morgan is a perfect bore of a hero. Not only is he shrewd, sensitive, modest, kind, clean, thrifty and anachronistically politically correct, but he is a sexual volcano, too, with "the physique of an ancient Greek statue" - as the villainous seductress reflects after one bout of "sodden ecstasies."

Surprisingly, though, the story picks up a bit with Part Four, which covers the First Fleet's yearlong journey to the bottom of the world with its ill-assorted cargo of unfortunates. Richard's inner fires are mercifully banked until the very end of Part Six (although he becomes the unrequited love object of an even handsomer, ickier, blue-eyed captain), and the broad canvases successively depicting convict life onboard ship, in the ragtag settlement at Port Jackson and on Norfolk Island, Richard's eventual destination are vividly painted. Sentimentality and high melodrama remain McCullough's narrative modes of choice, but there is more room in the latter part of the book for her particular strengths.

McCullough really shines at scene-setting, as opposed to history, although historical research obviously goes into it. She may not be able to produce a credible hero to save her life, or settle an academic debate about the philosophical underpinnings of transportation, but she can conjure a tavern or courtroom scene or the below-decks hell of a convict ship in all their grainy, teeming, Hogarthian detail. Her nuanced portrayal of the First Settlement of Norfolk Island - that lovely, windswept rock 1,000 miles out in the Pacific, where she lives - is especially valuable as a counter to the ghastly reputation acquired by the place during later, crueler settlements.

Her passion for period detail also crops up in the many long but irresistible passages describing precisely how things were made and how they worked. An 18th-century musket, a rum distillery, a dripstone, a Thames dredger, a sawpit, a convict's leg irons: There is no physical object that fails to fascinate McCullough - a neurophysiologist by training, after all.

So there is gold amid the dross. Which predominates will depend on how individual readers react to the hopelessly idealized Richard Morgan. Certainly, his background and his fate thus far in the saga make him far from representative of the common run of First Fleet felons. To that extent, McCullough falls short of her own stated aim of illuminating the great transportation experiment from the inside: "What were the circumstances of these people's crimes? How did English justice work? How did the felons rub along together? What did they cling to sustain their spirits?" she asks rhetorically in her afterword.

These are historians' questions, and McCullough is no historian: She has the soul of a romance novelist, the avid eye of a craftsman and the brain of a scientist. Thus, her portrait of an already confused period is skewed by her own dissonant inclinations, and her answers remain partial at best. But it is also why there are bits and pieces of this book that stick in the memory like burrs.

Elizabeth Ward, an Australian, is an editor with the Japan Times in Tokyo.