By all accounts, Courtenay’s novels are phenomenal sellers. I cannot conceive of equal numbers of contemporary buyers, here or abroad, tackling older historical blockbusters, such as Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life. If they did so, they might, of course, discover fiction characterised, like Courtenay’s, by sustained passages of sensationalism and romantic melodrama, and a comfortable expansiveness (for the writer) where explanations and descriptions of motives are concerned. Imagine Australian readers intuitively seeking out and thrilling to the excitement of Capricornia, or A Fringe of Leaves, unless dragooned to the task in the course of formal literary studies? And yet Courtenay’s Tasmanian novels surely slot into the genre of the backward glance at Australian history. We can expect more, of course, from Courtenay himself, as he carries forward the fortunes of Ikey Solomon’s heirs and successors; and from Christopher Koch, as he journeys backward to recount the actions of the predecessors of Mike Langford, twentieth-century hero of Highways to a War.

Tommo & Hawk advances the story of twin lads born to the monstrous, transported harlot Sperm Whale Sally toward the end of Courtenay’s The Potato Factory. Hallmarks of Courtenay’s style recur in Tommo & Hawk. Counter to what one reviewer has claimed concerning this novel, I would say that Courtenay’s characters are not ‘cardboard cut-outs’, but rather larger-than-life figures. (One might as well assail Gargantua and Pantagruel for its woeful failure to naturalistically portray large medieval French persons as attack Courtenay’s fantasy for presenting exaggerated genetic sports.)

Courtenay counterpoints sentimental vignettes with graphic episodes of physical and verbal violence. His low-life heroes and villains speak versions of reconstructed nineteenth-century donnish or vulgar patois, in overt and covert homage to Dickens and other writers. A pedantic concern to explain the derivations and mechanisms of social and technical details (of whaling, guerilla warfare, Maori customs, colonial brewing and much else) intrudes in the telling and, accompanying this, the reader is treated to an overall didactic tone which implies that Australian history was really quite as Courtenay imagines it, and that you could do a lot worse than believe him. But I hazard that Courtenay doesn’t take all his readers for incompetents. I’m sure he wouldn’t have us take Jack or Philip Lindsay’s historical romances for the world itself of the periods they convey.

To my mind, Tommo & Hawk represents a structural advance over its prequel. The narration of The Potato Factory gave added point to the overtones of ‘know-all’ inherent in the term ‘omniscient narrator’, and I felt utterly badgered by the story-teller’s hectoring pedantry. There, I found the dialogue stilted, and the depictions of atrocities gratuitously disruptive to those moments of plain story-telling which Courtenay genuinely manages with canny control.

I’ll lay a card on the table and say that I have read the odd historical novel, so that it is inevitable that I should attempt to rate Courtenay’s work beside Scott, Dumas, Stendhal, Fontane, Balzac, Clarke, Boldrewood, Tolstoy, Richardson, White, Pynchon, Shadbolt, and a host of other writers. Past experience of reading is an inescapable cargo one brings to any fresh work in the genre, and part of the pleasure of the reading is the recognition of borrowings, analogies and so on – even when they’re blatantly flaunted or amusingly anachronistic. And there are aspects of Tommo & Hawk which defied all efforts to admire the technique, even while I appreciate the work’s ambition. Given that I cannot expunge all previous reading, it is not a marvel that I found some of those features of The Potato Factory annoyingly reproduced in Tommo & Hawk.

The presentation of Tommo causes most of my frustration with Courtenay’s technique. While Tommo speaks in a sort of semi-literate cockney larrikinese, much of his ‘straight’ relation of events suggests that Courtenay, rather than Tommo, is having trouble with control of the personality he’s trying to convey. Frankly, I think Courtenay makes too heavy a demand on his readers to believe that Tommo never progresses in all his twenty-odd years sojourning beyond employing broken English. The problem is compounded when we’re expected to believe that Tommo’s mother, Mary, and Maggie Pye (the novel’s chief love-interest) also employ identical lingo, through all their social intercourse. While their undifferentiated spoken lingo is accurate enough by slang­dictionary accounts, it points up the trouble with trying to write sustained passages in argot for a readership which, by and large, has more sophisticated expectations of late twentieth­century fiction. The disparity between what Tommo says, and what he seems to be reciting to a patient listener, produces a creaking narrative rather than a work which impresses through fluctuations of tone.

At his best, Courtenay does not have his narrators offer superfluous explanations of motive. It may be that much of the readership Courtenay actively pursues really needs to be ‘taught’, however. And it may well be that one ingredient of broadcast fiction is insistence through repeated assertions by the narrator that such-and-such is the reason for certain behavioural traits, and that we must never forget who is telling the tale. Nor are we allowed to forget which character is speaking: Ikey Solomon’s signature is easy, because he uses Yiddish expressions, but Mary Abacus must always be named because her rival Hannah also speaks broken English.

For all this, Tommo & Hawk gains from double narration. Coming straight from a close reading of The Potato Factory, it is refreshing to have two voices telling the story. The unlikely twins Tommo and Hawk recount their adventures in different tones, signalling their opposing temperament and proclivities. Hawk is the far more interesting character, a self-taught aficionado of the Confucian analects and European classics, a pacifist by inclination but a shrewd strategist in war, who credibly puts his experiences into broader cultural perspective and remains alert to the shifts in the societies he moves in. He speaks in what seems a parody of a parsonage-educated gentleman, or a nouveau riche trying to hide his origins, but it’s welcome relief from the ‘I goes’, ‘I does this’ vernacular of Tommo.

I wondered as I read this novel what the buyers would make of the dust-jacket claims of brilliance. I have no doubt it will become a best-seller. But thoroughly read and best enjoyed? The few reviews of Tommo & Hawk which I’ve seen have been damning, and I don’t propose to follow suit; I have met people who claim to have ‘loved’ or to have point-blank loathed (and abandoned) The Potato Factory, and I have compared notes with them; and nothing has altered my conviction that at the very least Tommo & Hawk is likely to engage readers with a sense of the power of fiction to provoke’ revision’ of our past.

In the case of Courtenay, damning reviews may contain more than a whiff of elitism regarding popular fiction. I have no trouble with popular fiction and its limitations which contribute to, rather than detract from, its appeal. Excess is the stuff of the outer reaches of hard-boiled, sci-fantasy, horror, terror, westerns, police drama, adventure, and much else. Northanger Abbey, Nightmare Abbey, The Iron Dream, and innumerable other parodies have attested to the fascinated amusement of halfway decent writers with genre-pieces which command wide audiences and near-manic enthusiasm among explorers of literature’s sub-canopy. If Bryce Courtenay’s Tommo & Hawk is all the things its detractors assert, it will nonetheless make a ripper movie, and I, for one, will be interested to see how Courtenay follows an act like this.

Like Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, Tommo & Hawk leans on Dickens. So did Herbert’s Capricornia; it’s one-up for literature to defeat all fashionable notions of the outmoded past and endlessly make that experience live again. Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon is revelatory concerning the grip of the past on events which still dominate lives north and south of the divide between then and now. I suspect that Courtenay will have the last laugh on his critics in Australia. Courtenay’s not in the same class as Maurice Shadbolt in depicting the Maori wars; nor is he in the same league as Christopher Koch, so far, in showing us how Tasmania’s experience shapes the present. But his account of the Lambing Flat massacre is masterly, and so is his grisly version of life on a whaling ship (pace Melville), and of the routines of prize-fighting in the colony of New South Wales. Tommo & Hawk is not a Mason & Dixon in terms of writerly sophistication; but it will fuel more than the machine of Courtenay’s publishing house and will, I expect, become a landmark for consideration in institutions where the ‘best-seller’ is an object of serious investigation by students of multinational media manipulation and control.