GatesyRead

  The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It’s not that I don’t admire the author: Richardson’s first novel Maurice Guest (1908) is a true favourite I read once a decade. But I baulked at Mahoney – it seemed overly long; the image on the cover looked too colonial; I liked her Leipzig tale so much it was bound to disappoint. At last, I found a reason: research for my next fictional project would require engaging with fiction and non-fiction to do with 19 th Australia. I pulled Mahoney from the shelf, opened the first page, and plunged in. ‘In a shaft of the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive,’ reads the opening line. A few pages later, the grim humour of the anonymous colonial death: ‘Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a glove fits the hand’ (pp. 7-9). Paul Giles writes that the novel, ‘takes the theme of the self-made man, the characteristically Victorian trope of a picaresque hero which American fiction reconf