Promised Lands

While researching a failed 18th-century Utopian settlement, an embittered history professor with Utopian ideas for transforming his school draws parallels between history and his own life. In the meantime, his wife has her own Utopian ideas wherein their handicapped son would become mankind's savior. A sublimely engrossing novel about idealism and exile.

"What would happen if men like you ran the world, Mr. Dawes?" asks the governor of Australia's Sidney Cove colony, circa 1790. Lt. William Dawes once believed that Sidney Cove would be the basis of an ideal world. but he discovers a reality where planning decisions are based on expediency, convicts sell favors to marines, and natives are dispossessed. His gradual awakening is hastened by his role in a smallpox plague and his relationships with the other colonists and, eventually, the aboriginal girl Booron. The tale shifts to the present day, where Stephen Beech, who attempted to implement a utopian vision of his own as a school administrator, is writing the story of Sidney Cove. Olla, his wife, has had a vision that she is sure their deformed son Daniel will use to transform the world. Stephen and Olla's story intermingles with Dawes's, illuminating their individual interpretations of utopia. Rogers's superbly crafted narrative immerses the reader in the harsh choices and conditions of colonial life and in a political and philosophical exploration of utopias as framed by the governor's question. Highly recommended.?Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rogers weaves three narratives together to create an engrossing meditation on illusions and reality. First there is William Dawes, member of the first British settlement in Australia in 1788, officially assigned to construct an observatory and make astronomical records, but circumstances dictate that he must spend most of his energies as the colony surveyor. Dawes finds life to be a constant struggle between the potential new world, which he idealizes, and the harsh demands of reality. Then there is Stephen, a modern-day British author, writing a narrative of Dawes' life. Stephen's socialist ideals have recently caused the disastrous downfall of a children's school that he had hoped would create an enlightened new generation. His wife is Olla, a Polish emigre, whose story appears initially void of illusion; then we learn that she might be laboring under the greatest fantasy: she believes that her severely crippled son is actually humankind's newborn savior. Themes within the story constantly echo and reverberate in this extremely satisfying work for the serious reader. Eric Robbins

Following a popular trend, Rogers's latest (after Her Living Image, 1986, etc.) fuses the past and the present, reaching from the 18th-century founding of a British colony in Australia to a failing 20th-century English marriage, and conjoining the roles of two idealists, each disillusioned in his own time and place. When William Dawes lands in Australia as a young lieutenant in the British colonial force, he aims only to set up an observatory and carry out his assigned astronomer's duties. The difficulties of taming the wilderness and overseeing the cargo of convicts who are the first colonists, however, soon have him otherwise employed, and only in his spare time does he pursue his dream. His latter-day chronicler, Stephen Beech, similarly taxed by pursuing an idealistic mission in education amid the harsh realities of the British school system, has retreated to his research and writing. William's drive gets the observatory built, but his principles set him up for a series of falls, first with a female convict he befriends, then with another convict he has protected, only to have the man deliberately infect the natives with smallpox, to catastrophic effect. Finally, forced to go on a hunt for innocent natives who will be killed in retribution for the murder of a pederast who'd been in the favor of the colony's governor, William decides he's had enough and heads home. Stephen, having chosen a working-class wife and tried to be her Pygmalion, with her resentment and a deformed infant the only results, eventually packs it in too, going off to Australia in search of his subject--and himself. Ambitious and solidly researched, but the different centuries and their challenges remain largely in separate orbits, with only a huge effort at contrivance pulling them parallel, and then only briefly. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.