The Yandilli Trilogy

Rodney Hall's The Yandilli Trilogy consists of three novels published (not in order) between 1988 and 1993: The Second Bridegroom; The Grisly Wife; and Captivity Captive. (Only the final novel in the trilogy deals with an actual historical event, the never-solved Gatton murders of 1898.) All three novels share roughly the same physical setting in New South Wales, but they span well over a century--from the late 1830s (when the events of the first take place) to the mid-1950s (when the last novel is narrated). Each novel is told in the first person, in three carefully defined voices: the semi-educated letter written by FJ, a transported forger from the Isle of Man; the breathy conversation of Catherine Byrne, who came to Australia from England as part of a tiny cult headed by her husband; and the self-consciously literate prose of Patrick Murphy, a native Australian who nevertheless finds himself identifying with his Irish roots. Of the three narrators, only Murphy sees himself as self-consciously creating a text--what he repeatedly dubs a "history"--for a general audience. Indeed, he believes that his father singled him out for precisely that purpose: "to celebrate our little world, the family needed a historian, a lawman, a clerk, an accountant" (YT: CC, 432). By contrast, FJ's letter, which we gradually realize is written to the wife of Edwin Atholl, the Master of the new settlement, accidentally finds its way to the "wrong" destination, while Catherine's account of her husband and the failed cult (repeatedly interrupted by her coughing) clearly meets with a somewhat irritated reception from its silent auditor, Sergeant Arrell.

I'd hesitate to describe the historical action of these novels as cyclical. While themes and events repeat themselves from novel to novel, the repetition is not so much a return as it is a distorted echo. For example, all three novels dwell on the relationship between naming and order. FJ--who, significantly, doesn't have a name--fears that naming might be an act of violence against the lush strangeness of the new world. Catherine Byrne, however, is a firm believer in everything having its own right name, while Patrick Murphy finds power in his saint's name. The echoes multiply. FJ's near-sightedness in SB manifests itself in another character in GW; FJ himself pops up in GW, just as Catherine Byrne and her son appear in CC. All three novels feature symbolic journeys into the wilderness, just as all three include journeys from Europe. (But only Patrick Murphy comes back to Australia from Europe.) All three dwell on imprisonment, whether literal (as in FJ's case) or figurative (the self-imposed isolation and intense punishments of both GW and CC). All three involve distorted expressions of sexuality, from FJ's obsession with Mrs. Atholl to Catherine's rape (in effect) by her husband to the incestuous desires of several characters, the narrator included, in the final novel. All three feature mentally impaired minor characters, two of them brain-damaged and one insane. And all three revolve around misprisions of murder, as it were, including confessions that go spectacularly awry.

What sets Patrick Murphy's narrative apart, aside from its self-awareness, is that only Murphy conceptualizes himself as an Australian--even as he reimagines Australia as a kind of Ireland. FJ, the forger, certainly winds up melding with the landscape, but he obviously doesn't choose his final place of residence. Nor, exactly, does Catherine Byrne, who suggests that her husband take his tiny cult to Australia only so as to avoid going to China. Murphy, however, is the first narrator to be "Australian" both by birth and by choice. Even so, the final lines of the novel--"This was the Ireland of my youthful captivity, which I, like Saint Patrick, must embrace again with the faith I had learned in France. I must at the same time love and defeat him. Pride gave me no choice" (YT: CC, 491)--suggests that Murphy's sense of national identity remains somewhat troubled. Murphy's "love" for his native country requires him to transform it, to bend it to his "pride"--which, in turns, calls into question Murphy's identification with the saint. FJ resents Atholl's physical intrusion into the untamed landscape, but Murphy, like Catherine Byrne, takes pride in how his family reshapes the forest in which they dwell. Rodney Smith points out that "Hall’s broadest political theme is that the struggle for power in Australia is between colonising forces that want to reinvent Australia for their purposes and the resistance that the land and its people can offer by remaining alien and unknown," and we see that at work, I think, in Murphy's ambivalent understanding of what his own Australian-ness might mean. Politics aside, however, the trilogy is striking work--definitely worth a close reading.