A curious tale where Keneally adopts the guise of the 13 year old daughter of the East India Compny chief on the island of Saint Helena. This lass - who did exist in real life - in her lanter years wrote a 168 page monograph of her friendship with Napoleon when he was isolated on the rock that is the island having been sent there by those countries who defeated this French Emperor in 1815.

The book has lots of quaint information about the people of Saint Helena at the time. However we do not get a sense of the historically significant statesman that Napoleon was. It's not that we think of them in history when in history we blandly think of Napoleon perched (alone?) on his rock in the middle of the south Atlantic.

But, we do get an idea of a British colony in the early 19th century and in that sense this book is interesting as a shadow of what it might have been like in New South Wales at the same time when the incipient 'Australia' was subject to the whims of the British Parliament and its Secretary of State and the battle between the Tory's and Wiggs.

The other connection with Australia is that the family of the Saint Helena East India Comapny man ended up in Sydney as Colonial Treasurer. The youngest son of that family did come to something in his later life having established a sheep run at Mount Eliza near Melbourne.

However, this book is too long and lazy. History is more interesting. ( )

This book took me a long time to read, not because I was not interested in the subject, the effect of Napoleon's exile on St Helena on an English family there; not because the writing was poor; but more because, in this fictionalised account, I could not empathise with any of the characters. I am sure this is partly because the focus is on a young girl/woman, but also because of the overt sympathy Keneally shows towards the "Emperor", which is in line ,with his general antipathy towards the British shown in other books. Overall, it was ,a reason able read, but not one I would recommend widely ( )

Napoleon's Last Island by Thomas Keneally is a recommended historical fiction novel of Betsy Balcombe's account of Napoleon Bonaparte's banishment to the island of Saint Helena.

The story, written as journal entries, opens with Napoleon's death, as told by a British teenager, Betsy Balcombe, who befriended Bonaparte and then goes back to October of 1815 when Napoleon Bonaparte was first exiled to St. Helena, an island governed by the English. He is taken in by William Balcombe, a representative of the East India Company who is the provisioner of goods on the island. Bonaparte stays in the guest house because his resident wasn't ready. Napoleon and his small French entourage are well provided for while with the Balcombe's. He and Balcombe's daughter, Betsy, eventually become friends. When St. Helena’s new British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, arrives, he is determine to make Napoleon's stay on the island painful and closer to being imprisonment. He also makes the Balcombe's suffer for their hospitality to Napoleon. The family struggles after their association with Napoleon, and move to Australia..

The formality of the language in the journal entries helps set the period tone for the novel. While it is technically well written and full of accurate, period details, and some interesting facts, the novel starts out strong and later slows down, especially as it details Betsy's growing up. The problem is that Betsy is not interesting enough to carry the story and after time the novel becomes slow and tedious. As noted by other reviews, there is some fictional ridiculousness and some obvious prejudice shown by Keneally toward the British, which lessens the impact of the rest of the narrative.

Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher for review purposes.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1775782751 ( )

Abandoned read. Napoleon was exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic in 1815. His residence was not fully renovated so he spent time near the Balcombe family home. Betsy Balcombe, in particular, became a friend of Napoleon for the remainder of their lives. Keneally's well-researched novel focuses on the strange relationship between the two. What the novelist failed to do was create anything that engaged me as a reader. I made it approximately one third of the way into the book before deciding to quit reading it. Other persons may find the book more engaging than I did, particularly if they have a strong interest in Napoleon or enjoyed other books by the author. This review is based on an advance reader's e-galley provided by the publisher through Edelweiss for review purposes.

I know that authors must write the books they feel impelled to write, but as I put the book down at the end of my reading, I thought that this could have been a more compelling book if Tom Keneally had focussed his attention differently in this novel, Napoleon’s Last Island…

According to the prologue, (mischievously entitled ‘Terre Napoléon’ which was the name bestowed on Australia’s southern coast by the French explorer Nicolas Baudin), Keneally became intrigued by the story of Betsy Balcombe when he visited the Napoleon exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Some of the memorabilia was credited to Betsy Balcombe, who had lived on the Mornington Peninsula and whose descendants had inherited the relics. This novel is his story of the relationship between 14 year-old Betsy and Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) when they were neighbours on the island of St Helena in the southern Atlantic where Napoleon was exiled.

Now, as it happens, I am simultaneously reading Xavier Herbert’s chunkster Poor Fellow My Country and yesterday (before I read the concluding chapters of Napoleon’s Last Island), I came across a scene in which a character at a social occasion meets the British General who commanded his brother’s last fatal day at Gallipoli. Jeremy Delacy, characterised as an inherently reasonable man normally of great restraint, can’t control his rising rage, and decks the General, who his brother had described in a letter as a ‘homicidal maniac’ who cared nothing for the fate of the men. The two books came together in my imagination when I considered what it might be like to have custody of the Emperor whose ambitions caused 65000 casualties at the Battle of Waterloo alone, 17000 of whom were British. I thought of the treatment of Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević in our own time, and of the Nuremburg Trials and the Tokyo Trials. The desire to force retribution for great wrongs can very easily become vengeance. The very human story of the British soldiers guarding Napoleon could have been a much more powerful story than the one that Keneally has written in Napoleon’s Last Island.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/05/napoleons-last-island-by-tom-keneally/ ( )