I love a book with short chapters. They propelled me through what feels like a short story, even though some of the chapter names were a bit perfunctory, almost tabloid in style. The very fine balance between Elizabeth's voice and the author, Kate Grenville's voice gradually tips into an almost farcical didacticism, The former becoming unbelievable as the latter dominates - a voice fresh from a workshop on the correct things to write about Indigenous colonial relations.

I wanted this curiously truncated book to succeed because I have several personal connections to the story: my mother was very involved in the restoration of Elizabeth Farm and, I was delighted and surprised to find a close relative, Nicholas Nepean (one of my middle names is Nepean) appear, even if it was not a particularly flattering portrayal.

What seems like the mundane discontent of a bad marriage turns almost heroic as Elizabeth gives birth to a sickly child. But there is something quite stultified about Elizabeth as a character (her children have no character). Perhaps it's because (like her marriage) Elizabeth can't escape her author's insistence that she have a 21st Century perspective.

Kate Grenville has missed a wonderful opportunity to examine how the various ways people thought about Aborigines influenced what they saw. This is something Keith Willey examines in his intriguing but little-known book [b:When the Sky Fell Down: The Destruction of the Tribes of the Sydney Region, 1788-1850's|975423|WHEN THE SKY FELL DOWN The Destruction of the Tribes of the Sydney Region 1788-1850s|Keith Willey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394329290l/975423._SY75_.jpg|960320]

Next, I'm thinking I'll read a history of the Aboriginal warrior [b:Pemulwuy, The Rainbow Warrior|6323289|Pemulwuy, The Rainbow Warrior|Eric Willmot|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361081906l/6323289._SX50_.jpg|6508759] and from that perspective, I may be able to offer some more insightful comments about Kate Grenville's historical research. ( )

I had hesitations about reading this thinking it would be too 'literary' for my tastes. I was wrong - this was a very enjoyable book telling the story of one woman's thwarted happiness and the confines of her life. It does not paint a pretty picture of John MacArthur or colonial life and made me seek out more information about his wife, Elizabeth.
I will definitely read more by Kate Grenville. ( )

Boring, stopped half way through. ( )

This is a fictionalised account of the life of Elizabeth Macarthur, one of the pioneers in the English settlement of Sydney. Elizabeth's husband John is famed as the "father of the wool industry", but there is a strong case to be made that Elizabeth's contributions to this were equally important.

Grenville, however, gives short shrift to Elizabeth's contribution to history, and prefers to focus the story on her early life, her relationship with the impetuous John, her time in convict Sydney, and some invented salacious details about her love life. Once the Macarthurs move to Parramatta and the wool breeding business starts off, Grenville loses interest, however this is precisely the point where Elizabeth becomes a historically interesting figure, rather than a vehicle for invented melodrama.

Grenville introduces her story with an "Editor's Note" talking about some major document find at Elizabeth Farm that she then has to explain, in an Author's Note at the end, was something that she just made up. Why bother topping and tailing a novel with such a pointless and unnecessary device, which adds nothing to the story that she is telling? ( )

During Sydney’s colonial infancy in the late eighteenth century, there lived John Macarthur, a man credited with introducing the sheep breed that would make Australian wool famous, and himself, a fortune. But what if he wasn’t the innovator he claimed to be, nor a gifted leader and businessman, but merely a bully on the make who got lucky? Indeed, let’s suppose that his luckiest break, though he wouldn’t have called it that, was to marry Elizabeth Veale, who left behind a diary telling what may or may not be the real story?

Such is the premise Grenville spins, and what a compelling story she derives from this tight space between truth and fiction. There was no such diary, but turning Elizabeth’s letters to England on their head, Grenville imagines the meaning between the lines as opposite to their literal sense, for, after all, husband John reads them before they cross the ocean — yes, he’s that controlling, and worse.

Through the Macarthurs’ marriage, Grenville retells the story of English colonialism in Sydney, because John is a schemer, and Elizabeth, the often appalled onlooker. The author could have overplayed this and made her protagonist a progressive thinker who rails, in her head, against the maltreatment of the indigenous populations. Rather, as a feeling person, Elizabeth has the capacity to put herself in someone else’s viewpoint, but she has few illusions that she’s any more compassionate than her countrymen, because she takes no action. That criticism may exaggerate, but it’s not far-fetched, for Elizabeth, as a victim of brutality, can surely recognize that in others.

However, relations between husband and wife drive the story. Elizabeth has wit, spirit, and excellent diplomatic survival skills, but she’s had to learn them, on the fly. Her girlhood is a series of abandonments and disappointments, leavened by her beloved grandfather, who, though inflexible in his religious and moral code, encourages his granddaughter to have an inner life and to love nature. Unbeknownst to her, these are two essential weapons in her war of self-defense against her future brute of a husband.

I won’t reveal how she becomes shackled to such a blight on the human race, but I will tell you that the key pleasure in A Room Made of Leaves comes from Elizabeth’s slow but steady education. Catering to his view of her, and of women in general, she pretends to be incapable of serious thought, by which she learns to placate, flatter, outwit, and soothe John, who’s half as smart as he thinks he is. His greatest talent consists of hatching conspiracies to ruin men who haven’t treated him like “a gentleman.” As is often the case with malicious snobs, he knows he has no real claim to that status, and he takes pleasure in his successful cabals, the more vicious, the better.

He’s just as dangerous at home, where he expects complete fealty. Elizabeth takes steps not to change him — heavens, no — but to protect herself as best she can, enough to create a place in her mind where she views herself as worthy, capable, and by no means powerless. That the power largely exists in thought and outlook may not seem like much, at first glance. But Elizabeth’s triumph is that no matter how Macarthur imprisons her in his iron fist, she’s free to think what she likes. And, once in a while, to do more than that.

That’s the inner life her grandfather fostered in her. As for the nature, that’s Australia itself. Interestingly, among the few English residents of Sydney who aren’t convicts, such as the Macarthurs (he’s a military officer), practically no one besides Elizabeth even seems to notice how beautiful the land is. In one of her favorite spots, the room named in the title, she realizes how the scenery can help her spirit.

Since A Room Made of Leaves purports to be a diary, the chapters are very short, sometimes only a page. I’ve never liked that style of narrative, which can easily become fragmented, offering undeveloped, shallow bits. But here, Grenville creates a cohesive whole, and though the individual scenes may feel cut short, the ensemble achieves a profound depth. ( )