'The Bright Side of My Condition' by Charlotte Randall

I am two-thirds of the way through, and very much enjoying, this excellent and interesting novel based on an actual group of four convicts who escaped from Norfolk Island aboard a sealing ship in the early nineteenth century and ended up spending a decade on an isolated subantarctic island in the Snares. Randall uses her deliberately small palette to examine issues of restriction and freedom, nature and culture, individual and society, doing and observing, value and subsistence, justice and necessity without these ever feeling forced or breaking the compelling narrative voice of the main character, Bloodworth. Where I'm up to at present, Bloodworth is not only isolated on a small island in the middle of the southern ocean, he has been further isolated in a deep hole for what his comrades (all wonderfully drawn) regard as a serious crime. 

 January 2015