Robert Edric

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If the most sober reflection of a writer’s public success is the availability of their work then it would seem that Robert Edric operates in a cruel wilderness.  No surprise to him, perhaps, since few of his novels are readily available.  Yet I finished ‘The Book of the Heathen’ when it came out with the overwhelming feeling that I had just read a masterpiece.  Subsequent acquaintance with some of his earlier novels convinces me that he is a writer of the first rank.

‘The Book of the Heathen’ takes place in colonial West Africa in 1897.  It is not the first time that Edric has ventured into far-flung corners of Empire.  In ‘Elysium’, set in Tasmania in 1869, we even meet Bone as a young corporal.  Here too the rottenness of the Imperial project and the elimination of the Aborigines are depicted with ghastly, superb richness: events and images have a resonance that can only be achieved because the author knows precisely what he is trying to do.  The same is true in ‘Broken Lands’, a terrifying novel about the doomed expedition to the Arctic under Sir John Franklin in 1845.  Here the evocation of the treacherous, savage landscape is so extraordinary and compelling that it dominates the novel - which is, presumably, the point.  But the numerous characters are also depicted with wonderful skill and sensitivity.  Given the robustness of the characters in all his novels, it comes as a surprise to realise that he never gives physical descriptions of them.  You learn about their injuries and their garments when necessary - an amputated foot, the clothes worn by the Aborigine Lanné, but rarely do you know the colour of a person’s hair or the shape of their face, or build. This is most striking in ‘In Desolate Heaven’.

Like most great writers, Edric’s prose is highly distinctive, and it is inseparable from his consistent vision.  The language is exact and the structure of his sentences formal.  The rhythm is steady and sustained, sometimes slightly laconic.  It is forensic prose, without sentiment.  But though he is a pitiless writer, he is also a compassionate one: he makes astonishing imaginative efforts for his characters and their worlds, which is why their predicaments are so affecting.  The inescapable grimness of his work may account for his limited readership, but it is strange how a work of art may be transfigured by its own power, when the depiction of terror and damnation becomes a thing of beauty because of its persuasiveness, its truth.  Robert Edric should not be missed.

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