Book Review: The Captain's Wife

The Captain's Wifeby Kirsten McKenzieJohn Murray, 320pp, £14.99

Our primary way of communicating today seems to be of the most public sort, via social networking sites where we can adopt different personae, make our private selves public ones that celebrate our kids, our jobs, our relationships. We write on these sites as parents, as lovers, as friends, as colleagues, as children. And we don't have to be authentic, either. We can pretend to be parents, lovers, friends, even colleagues of a distant sort.

That form of communication, by making a public performance out of our private selves, has long been encouraged in the publishing world, where, in the interests of marketing and selling books, writers are asked to perform their work in public, work that was most probably written in isolation, in private. Such emphasis on the public and on performance with regards to writing and publishing, though, can also suggest that same lack of authenticity that we see in other modern modes of communication.

Perhaps that lack of authenticity is why the historical novel in recent years has been so anxious to establish the reality of its worlds. Genre fiction, precisely because it is genre fiction, has to work hard to establish its physical credentials, so crime fiction writers make sure they check out police stations, morgues, forensic departments. Similarly, historical fiction writers have to work hard to establish the authenticity of their worlds. Want to know how to weave a wicker basket in the 13th century? Read a historical novel. Want to know which 16th-century herbs cured belly-ache? Read a historical novel.

Postmodern play with multiple selves and notions of artifice have been rejected: the historical novel today prefers a single consciousness and everything that is real. One of the first things that strikes the reader on picking up Kirsten McKenzie's second novel, a historical tale set in the 18th century about the world of sailing and piracy, is her use of authentic detail. It's there in words like "yetlin" and "vadmell"; in descriptions of silk shoes and moorfoul for supper; in the establishment of a world that is harsh and cruel, where drowning men are left to die for the sake of a few barrels of whisky.

McKenzie has two principal characters whose story we follow to the end: Mary Jones, who is married to a wealthy captain who owns his own vessel, and John Fullarton, who works his way up from being cabin boy to captain of his own ship. We see both these characters from childhood on, although they are born at different times, and we know, pretty much from the beginning and long before Mary ever finds out, that Fullerton is Mary's father. In that respect, McKenzie disturbs the current trend of historical novels by giving us two consciousnesses to follow, and she works hard to draw out equal amounts of sympathy for both - for the fatherless, sheltered young woman who marries an emotionally disturbed man, and for the illegitimate Fullarton, who runs away to sea when he is just a boy and is exploited, and toughened, by his experiences.

What McKenzie excels at is using period detail in the right way: just enough to give a feeling of authenticity but never so much that the history outweighs the story. The sense of difficulty at having to make one's own way in a world that is not sympathetic is always uppermost in the storytelling here: Mary learns as a child that she cannot trust her own mother, who pushes her into marriage; as a young woman that she cannot trust her husband, who is still grieving for his first wife; and as a lover that she cannot trust the man who says he will save her from it all. Fullarton learns to take what he can get: a poor ship's boy is never going to be given anything. Or at least, not anything he wants.

Both Mary and Fullarton are thus highly believable, convincing characters. McKenzie has a natural, fluid writing style, and in communicating their private stories to us through the novel's use of authentic detail, she is also enacting the historical novel's very anxiety about that authenticity, an anxiety that is perhaps about the historical novel's own status, and where it can go in an increasingly inauthentic world.

l Kirsten McKenzie is at the Edinburgh book festival on Monday 23 August.