"The truth is that if we are to be any use tomorrow we have to accept what happened yesterday - so you may be sure there's something amiss when one hears so much about what we will do in the future while there's never a peep about what we have already done."

Rodney Hall is an utterly absorbing writer, and The Grisly Wife is another great success, haunting, atmospheric, darkly funny, and painful in its profundity. In the late 1860s, a radical preacher sails from England to Australia to set up a mission in a remote part of the east coast, with his posse of female followers and his virgin wife, Catherine Byrne, the narrator of the novel. The emigrants set up their new home in the (fictional) settlement of Yandilli, the site of Hall's previous novel [b:The Second Bridegroom|747111|The Second Bridegroom (Yandilli Trilogy, #1)|Rodney Hall|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266632691l/747111._SX50_.jpg|733254] which was set around 1838, making this novel a thematic sequel.

Catherine - narrating her tale years later to an initially unnamed listener - is, like many of Hall's protagonists, a figure on the outskirts of her own culture. Like The Second Bridegroom's convict, who experienced the painful dawning of recognition when forced to interact with a society different to his own, Catherine is asking herself questions about social expectations, cultural norms, a figure of suppressed doubt amongst those who would see the choice between belief and savagery as a binary one.

"Ambition is a curious urge, don't you agree? being as much as to say if I do not surrender my place in life to struggle for a different place (some other person's place) then I will not quite fully live."

The novel falls squarely into the long tradition of tales about starchy British colonialists facing off against the Australian bush, attempting valiantly to replicate their culture in a location so very hostile to it. But it is also a novel about belief and doubt, about human connection, and the ways we attempt to navigate our lives as individuals while also existing in tandem with others. It is perhaps a slightly tougher read than Bridegroom on the grounds that Catherine's memory flits from idea to idea, year to year, seemingly haphazardly and with a more idiosyncratic speech pattern (she is rather like Emily Dickinson, with her love of dashes above all other punctuation).

The goal of literature is to discover. The goal of Australian literature is usually to discover what defines our country, our people. Hall suggests that we may not like what we find, but we have little choice, bound on a wheel of fire that must, someday, come full circle. ( )