South of Darkness is John Marsden’s first venture into adult fiction following a successful career as one of Australia’s most lauded writers for the young adult market. Perhaps most notable among his young adult titles is the Tomorrow series which sold more than 3 million copies and the first book of which was made into a movie.

With South of Darkness, Marsden has delivered a prodigious work of historical fiction in the tradition of Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life. It has all the fervour of a great Aussie yarn and is a rollicking migration story, beginning in old London before crossing the perilous seas to early penal life in Australia.

Through the narration of the protagonist, Barnaby Fletch, the reader is taken into a Dickensian London. Populated by a cast of mostly cruel characters, this is a world of hard, subsistence living in poverty and squalor. Barnaby’s voice defies expectations of how an orphan growing up in the slums of London – a place to which the locals have given the epithet ‘Hell’ – might sound, yet the character is so affable that the reader can’t help but overlook this and be charmed by him. Much like Dickens’s David Copperfield, Barnaby is a boy motivated by kindness, one whose gentle spirit is drawn in stark contrast to the harsh brutality of the world he inhabits.

Under threat from an unsavoury pursuer, Barnaby must flee. However, his unwise choice of refuge leads to wretched outcomes. He becomes a prisoner of the notorious Newgate Prison before being transported on the Admiral Barrington with the Third Fleet bound for Botany Bay. Far from feeling melancholic or burdened by his misfortune, Barnaby demonstrates great fortitude and a fool’s luck in transforming his prospects for the better. South of Darkness is an epic novel of great stature. Well may there be an encore!

Natalie Platten