The Ripping Tree
by Nikki Gemmell
copyright 2021,
read in January 2024
rated 5/10: readable but only if there's nothing else.
or 3/10: so bad it's embarrassing... but that's for the plot, not the writing.
This book is so woke that I won't sleep for a week.
Whyt guilt wrapped round thin straws of history, all viewed in the self-righteous glow of modern sensibilities. With a self-centred heroine who rejects any idea that is not her own.
The heroine is orphaned. Her brother sells the family house. To settle his debts, she claims. Really? It turns out that he owns a valuable farm in the colonies.
The brother could return to his farm and leave the heroine to shift for herself. Instead, he arranges a marriage -- standard idea for those days, though now less in favour -- in British-Australian culture. The heroine rejects the man, finally meets him, has the hots for him, realises that he and she would be a perfect match, but too late.
She sails to Australia. Has the hots for the stable boy. Is shipwrecked. And rescued by The Noble Savage. Who, incidentally, she has the hots for. Of course if she'd stayed put she would have been rescued by the local whyts, who scour the coast looking for survivors (or bodies).
The blak deposits her at the nearest whyt house. Where she immediately begins her work of destroying the family. Her first task is to manipulate the youngest son into supporting her and thus she alienates the boy from his family.
Then she has the hots for the eldest son but is less able to manipulate him.
Every few hours she will make a new discovery. Fail to look for any explanation. Storm in to confront the family and accuse them of committing not very explicit atrocities.
The whole book is not very explicit. The author uses some similes and many, many meaningless metaphors. She also plays with and misuses language. Despite all that, the book is easy to read. Just difficult to know what is happening.
Finally, the heroine forces the family to reveal its secrets.
They live in a colony where Saturday sport involves a massacre of Blaks. After church on Sunday, father announces that he has rounded up and slaughtered a few more blaks, the locals welcome this news with jolly back-slapping, warm handshakes and cheery congratulations.
And really, the family believes that the locals will be upset by the accidental killing of a couple more blaks. Really? Is that the big guilty secret? Good grief.
Just a few more bits of writer's rubbish:
The rich family settled in the one part of Australia where flies and mosquitoes come out at the same time of day. Unlucky and very unusual.
We're told that it's a terrible thing for blaks to be removed from their land, they will get sad.
Yet there is no sympathy for the mother, driven mad because she has been removed from her own land of Scotland. Because who cares, she's whyt.
In the West blaks cannot return to a house where someone has died. Yet the blak girl keeps returning to the site where her mother died and laid for days. Are blak customs different in the East?
Oh, and Chekhov's gun: The story is told by "our Grandmother" who must be well past 160 years old. One "nameless" listener decamps then returns... Oooh! how mysterious. How very significant! Except that it's not. He or she just disappears from the story.
The author says that it took her ten years to write this book. It would have been better if she had written it in ten weeks -- then taken another week to remove some of the obvious contradictions and overblown nonsense.
