Blair's Reviews > From the Wreck

I didn't know this when I started reading it, but From the Wreck is based on a real incident: the shipwreck of the Australian passenger ship SS Admella in 1859. Several rescue attempts failed, leaving victims of the disaster clinging to wreckage for over a week, and 89 people died. One of the 24 survivors was Jane Rawson's great-grandfather, George Hills. The only female survivor was Bridget Ledwith, whose identity was disputed in the years after the shipwreck (two different women wrote to a newspaper claiming to be her).

In Rawson's reimagining of the story, George Hills becomes obsessed with Bridget Ledwith, believing her to be an 'evil spirit', a 'sea creature'. She helped him survive, but those days were a living nightmare. George has what we would now recognise as PTSD and is unable to stop reliving the wreck. His search for Bridget makes him increasingly unstable.

So this could simply be the sad story of a man undone by his memories of a traumatic experience, and by enduring this experience before the psychological impact of such events was properly understood. But we also have chapters told from the perspective of George's eldest son, Henry. As long as he can remember, Henry has had his 'Mark' – it looks like a birthmark to everyone else, but it whispers to him: 'Mark told him things no one else knew'. He has strangely detailed knowledge of life under the sea; memories of a different type of existence.

From the Wreck is an intriguing and enthralling combination of historical and speculative fiction. A well-written, authentic historical tale that occasionally spins into out-there SF and makes it work like a dream. I was just as interested in the world of the human characters – a South Australian town in the 19th century, the 'Sailors' Home' in which George and family live – as I was in the question of whatever 'Mark' was. Certainly more subdued than your average science fiction novel, and effective with it.

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