Ken Gelder

So the novel takes you to 1870 and then produces an outpouring of grief for the dead Charles Dickens.

And there's a funeral, a state funeral, I think, really, in the novel that's staged, which is pretty true.

There were funerals for Dickens in Australia.

That's really where the novel takes you, I think, to the end of Dickens and the assessment of Dickens' reputation.

And Plawn seems to want to leave that reputation, his father's reputation, intact.

Well, not all that well, I think.

I mean, one of the problems is that Plawn himself is not a very interesting figure either.

and didn't do all that well.

He fell in love, and there's some of that romance in the novel.

But nothing much happens.

And as someone who's written on the colonial kangaroo hunt, I was really disappointed that there's no kangaroo hunting in the novel.

You occasionally see kangaroo skin, tobacco pouches, and someone is wearing a kangaroo coat and so on.

But

You know, there's actually not much adventure in this novel, and it's partly because Plawn is a relatively unadventurous type.

So he's quite modest in his ambitions.

You know, he's a bit moral.

He's a little judgmental.

He's a weak figure, and he's more acted upon than acts, and so that makes him a bit passive.

And, of course, he is completely...

under the shadow of his father, whose novels he's never read, actually.