The Second Bridegroom

The Australian author of Captivity Captive and Kisses of the Enemy has fashioned a strange, haunting narrative that is most successful when it is most elusive, but is oddly unconvincing in its plot details. Its protagonist is a young English printer convicted of forgery and sent to early-19th-century Australia. After killing a fellow convict who has brutalized him, he flees into the bush, where he is nurtured by a group of aborigines; and when they fall upon the new settlers and burn their camp, he is recaptured. The story is ostensibly written by the convict in captivity, partly as a demented love letter to the master settler's wife, whom he has glimpsed from afar; in a kind of postscript of would-be crushing irony, she gives her side of the story. This conceit and the mysterious resurrection of the murdered man are devices out of key with the rest, a beautifully written study of solitude and a poetic meditation on the meaning of civilization. Hall's prose, of exquisite flexibility and lucidity, yields countless memorable images, making the novel's sometimes clumsy apparatus all the more dismaying. (Sept.)