In 1628 the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s grand flagship, set out on her maiden voyage from Holland to her namesake: the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The ship foundered off the coast of western Australia, and the 300 surviving passengers and crew, including women and children, were stranded on the Houtman Abrolhos islands. What followed was a nightmare: merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz fomented a mutiny against the Batavia’s commander Francisco Pelsaert and he and his followers murdered nearly half of all who remained on the islands, enslaving the rest. By the time rescue came, only 122 passengers survived.
The first (and surprisingly, less interesting) of The Night Ship’s dual narratives is set aboard the Batavia. We meet the well-heeled nine-year-old Mayken, on her way to the Indies to join her father, a mysterious merchant ensconced in imperial luxury: “Her father has a marble mansion, so she’s told. He has a legion of servants and stacks of gold dishes. He has chestnut stallions and dapple mares.” Mayken travels with her doughty and superstitious nursemaid Imke, the first of an extensive cast of characters we will meet in this timeline who seldom rise above the stereotype: here is the lugubrious yet enchanting widow, here is the wily cabin boy, here is the twinkly eyed sailor named Holdfast. Here is an albatross, strangled on the deck. Mayken herself is precocious, indomitable and implausibly resistant to the rigid social stratification of 17th-century Dutch society. When Imke begins to sicken, Mayken is convinced by the wily cabin boy that her beloved nursemaid’s illness is caused by the Bullebak, a malign eel-like creature of folk legend. Disguised as a boy, she begins to search the dark and waterbound below-decks world of the Batavia for Imke’s phantom assailant.
The second strand of the novel takes place more than three centuries later, in Australia. It is 1989, and Gil, a sullen, lonely pre-adolescent, is taken to Beacon Island after his mother’s death, to live with his only remaining relative: an equally sullen and lonely grandfather, Joss. Introverted Gil, still traumatised by his troubled mother’s death, is a clear misfit among the island’s sparse and sinewy inhabitants, but he has his own brand of survivors’ instinct: “He can read a roadmap, do a decent French manicure, put a grown woman in the recovery position and shoplift a square meal.” Beacon is, of course, the same island on which the survivors of the wreck took unpropitious refuge, and Gil finds himself beguiled by its bloody history. He is drawn to a bush named the Raggedy Tree, where the locals leave offerings – “faceless dolls, faded bears” – for “the dead girl who haunts the island”, Little May, whose identity is wholly unmysterious by the time she is mentioned.
Gil and Mayken’s stories intersect, with the novel structured in alternating chapters. Although this bifurcated architecture allows for elegant moments of mirroring across the two timelines, I also found it frustrating: as the novel nears its climax, we swap so frequently between 1629 and 1989, Mayken and Gil, that both narratives seem to lose, rather than gather, momentum. This is a shame, as the book is clearly meticulously researched, and her account of the Batavia’s foundering is among the most compelling sections. I found myself wishing we’d spent less time groping in the dark for Mayken’s Bullebak and more in the eye of the storm, among squalls and screaming timbers.
For a novel inspired by a historical atrocity, The Night Ship is curiously insipid. The search for the Bullebak seems like unnecessary magic-realist interpolation into already fascinating fact. It never really goes anywhere, nor does it generate much dread through its soggy presence – one is left to conclude that the Bullebak is a metaphor, although for what is unclear. The evil of man? The corrosive power of greed? Perhaps I’m reading too much into a device solely meant to illustrate Mayken’s cosseted naivety. Her limited perspective also renders the colonial context of the Batavia’s voyage curiously absent, beyond vague allusions to the origins of Mayken’s father’s wealth. When the Batavia briefly anchors off the coast of Sierra Leone, an encounter with the Sierra Leonese is described with strange flatness, in a novel otherwise quite resplendent in its language: “The Batavia’s sailors greet the locals, unfurling rope ladders and climbing down to retrieve samples of goods and produce. The passengers marvel at the crafts and carvings, at the wonderful and strange new foods.” Then – on we sail.
Kidd is doubtless a talented writer and a skilled world-builder, but there was much in this novel I found wanting. Cornelisz was entirely forgettable, and his motivations for the bloodshed he unleashed go largely unexamined. At one point a kindly deckhand tells Gil not to “dwell on the dark things” in the story of the Batavia – but I wanted it darker. There was no real discomfort here, with the narrative’s cutting edge blunted by unnecessary whimsy.
• The Night Ship by Jess Kidd is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
