Mr. Darwin's Shooter: A Novel - Softcover

McDonald, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802143563 ISBN 13: 9780802143563

Publisher: Grove Press, 2008

Synopsis

From one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, a dazzling and deeply imagined exploration of ambition, natural marvels, and scientific discovery, and one of history’s most significant crises of faith. As a boy of thirteen, Syms Covington leaves his home in Bedford and goes to sea, passing into manhood as he sails the world, surveying Patagonia, and losing his virginity in the Pampas.  Aboard the HMS Beagle, he enters the service of Charles Darwin as an energetic and precocious fifteen-year-old, and in the course of their voyages together he shoots and collects hundreds of specimens for his gent,” specimens that become fundamental to the formulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now a crusty, eccentric, near-deaf old man, Covington has settled in Australia and is awaiting the arrival of the first copy of On the Origin of Species. Beset by guilt over participating in a work that will shake the human worldview to its foundations, he nonetheless wonders what part of himself might be reflected in Darwin’s oeuvre. Mr. Darwin’s Shooter captures its time with rare and dazzling skill, evoking an unforgettable but forgotten man at a watershed moment in history.

About this title

Review:

In Mr. Darwin's Shooter, Roger McDonald explores the evolution not just of flora and fauna but of friendship and belief. At 12 young Syms Covington escapes his father's slaughterhouse and England for life at sea. Already six feet tall and bursting with innocence, ambition, and faith, he dreams of glory. But three years later, in 1831, Covington is still only an odd-job boy and ship's fiddler on a barque named after a "beagle-hound." This boat, though, will prove his career salvation, for its cosseted passenger is Charles Darwin. The young naturalist soon marks the sailor out as an adequate aide, a "willing accomplice" to what the grown Covington will later consider "a great murder." By murder he means less the massive plundering of birds and beasts ("stopping the hearts of small life") than the undermining of Biblical truth. If species do in fact evolve, Covington wonders, what proof can there be of God's handiwork?

Syms Covington really was Darwin's shooter from 1832 to 1839, and even after he emigrated to Australia, the men continued their tense relationship--until, that is, a copy of The Origin of Species arrived. Though the boy was never the naturalist's "beau ideal" of a collector, still, Roger McDonald writes,

It was a marriage of convenience they had, and Darwin was like the fiancée who gives her consent to the match for reasons of suitability but through lack of love rues the intimacy--yet all the time lauding the practicality.

If this talented author occasionally lays on the archaisms too heavily, in Mr. Darwin's Shooter he has nonetheless fashioned a sensuous, provocative adventure. --Molly Winterbotham

From the Back Cover:

Roger McDonald is one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists, and with Mr. Darwin's Shooter he claims a prominent place in international literature. The story of the manservant described by Charles Darwin's biographer as "the unacknowledged shadow behind every triumph," Mr. Darwin's Shooter is a deeply imagined and stunningly well executed exploration of natural marvels and scientific discovery, masters and servants, ambition and adventure, and, above all, one of history's most significant crises of faith.

As a boy, Syms Covington was watched over by the beckoning image of Christian, John Bunyan's pilgrim, in the stained-glass window of his Bedford chapel-and at thirteen he left home and went to sea with the evangelical sailor John Phipps. Phipps' scatechizing could not, however, repress Covington's appetite for life and passage into manhood as he sailed the world, surveying Patagonia and losing his virginity in the Pampas. Aboard the HMS Beagle, he entered Darwin's service, an energetic and precocious fifteen-year-old. In the course of their voyages together over the next seven years, he shot and collected hundreds of specimens for his "gent," specimens that became fundamental to the formulation of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Now a crusty, near-deaf man of middle age, Covington has settled in Australia and is awaiting the arrival of the first copy of The Origin of Species. Beset by guilt over participating in a work that will shake the human worldview to its foundations, he nonetheless wonders what part of himself might be reflected in Darwin's oeuvre. Mr. Darwin's Shooter captures its time with rare and dazzling skill, evoking an unforgettable-but forgotten-man at a watershed moment in history.

International Acclaim for Mr. Darwin's Shooter
"[An] absorbing novel . . . McDonald's compelling writing-he styles his phrases to suggest 19th-Century rhythms-and his feel for places, for work and for the shaping of scenes help make Mr. Darwin's Shooter a most distinctive novel."-Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

"Engaging . . . McDonald's prose is uniformly well tuned and even his minor characters are observed with accuracy and humor . . . fully imagined and imbued with intellectual curiosity."-Emily Barton, The New York Times Book Review

"Exciting . . . a gripping rendering of Covington's struggle to reconcile his faith with his contribution to the theory of evolution-a by byproduct of his own seething ambition . . . Mr. McDonald has given this marginal historical figure a life, and what a life it is."-Gabriella Stern, The Wall Street Journal

"Cleverly imagined . . . A high-spirited, adventuresome, idiosyncratic ramble through the history of science . . . a picaresque novelization of the years Covington spent with Darwin in South America during the famed voyage of the beagle in the 1830s . . . [McDonald] shows a knack not only for a pungent sort of historical reconstruction but also for characters of craggy fragility . . . Mr. McDonald's lexicon was equal to the task of summing up out of facts and admiration a character you are not likely soon to forget."-Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

"A good historical novel is a glorious thing, and Roger McDonald has given us a story worthy of high praise . . . it is well worth the effort to be immersed in this exhilarating world."-Kristin Keith, City Paper (Philadelphia)

"Mr. Darwin's Shooter will be welcomed by all Darwin enthusiasts, and will probably inspire other readers to read [or reread] The Origin of Species."-Michele Ross, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A spectacular tale of nineteenth-century exploration and the conflict between science and religion . . . This is an impressively learned novel. . . . But its learning is worn lightly, and the drama never flags. . . . Brilliant work."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Gripping . . . unworldly and rather beautiful . . . There is something of Conrad in Roger McDonald's tortuously elegant prose and old-fashioned concern with morality and belief."-The Times Literary Supplement

"It rings with the tones of Stevenson, Melville, and Doctorow."-The Age (Melbourne)

"Powerful . . . extraordinarily successful . . . [A] fierce and fascinating novel."-The Guardian

"A sustained piece of imagining . . . beautifully observed . . . This is a lavish, rich novel."-The Independent

"Like Peter Carey with his rollicking challenge to the Dickensian map of the moral work in Jack Maggs, McDonald has profited handsomely from the fertile territories open to novelists . . . McDonald's book expands its lungs and shouts out a song in praise of human diversity and spirit."-The Courier-Mail

"I began reading Mr. Darwin's Shooter at the usual brisk speed but then slowed myself to a scant fifty pages per day, the better to experience the exquisite prose that so ably encompasses the faux war between God and the range of the human mind. I cannot recommend a book more highly."-Jim Harrison

Roger McDonald was born in rural New South Wales in 1941 and educated at country schools and in Sydney, where he still lives. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, travel writing, essays, and screenplays. His six novels include Slipstream, Water Man, and 1915, which won the Age Book of the Year Award and the South Australian Government Biennial Prize for Literature. His autobiographical account of working as a shearers' cook in outback Australia, Shearers' Motel, won the National Banjo Award for Non-Fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0802143563
• ISBN 13: 9780802143563
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 364