The Bright Side of my Condition was a finalist in the Fiction category of the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards.
“Maybe next time I get it right. Forget special. Next time I come back as a whalefish breathing steady in the lovely deeps.” So speaks Bloodworth, convict-narrator of Charlotte Randall’s The Bright Side of my Condition. And Randall indeed seems to be grappling with just that - what is the point of our brief human lives? When we eventually shuffle off this mortal coil, should we be remembered for, or remember ourselves as ‘special’, or should our successes instead be measured by the twin metric of beauty and enjoyment? As Bloodworth muses, the penguins know:
... their useless stumpy wings that don’t fly, their duck feet that don’t walk, their bodies jes a starchy morning suit, but look how they contrive to free their selfs from their limits and enjoy their lives.
Look how they grin, he says.
Randall writes her first person narrative as the man of the time would speak. The opening sections bloom with ‘I dint say a word’ and ‘I’m Bloodworth. It aint a name I ever heared of before it were thrust upon me.’ This jars, to begin with. But as the story progresses, it quickly becomes a an obviously strong narrative voice. Bloodworth is hard to like, but he must have grown on me - the surreal change of form at the end of the book left me caring for his fate, and I was surprised by this. He is not really a likeable character, but is richly imagined. More importantly, his experience is an allegorical tale that explores issues of existentialism, freedom and choice. “And yer have to ask,” says Bloodworth, “... what even were I brung here for? Jes to walk alone across these cliffs?”
In three parts, the novel addresses ‘The Early Years’, ‘The Middle Years’, and ‘Eternity’ of the experiences of four convicts who escaped from Norfolk Island onto a sealing ship. The ship did not have enough food to feed the crew and the convicts, and so they were discharged onto one of The Snares, a group of subantarctic islands 200 kilometres from the South Island of New Zealand. The collective area of these islands equate to 3.5 kilometres squared. If it sounds foreboding and harsh, it is. The experiences of the four men are of the environment, each other and the self, for that is all there really is. Seals are murdered for their skins, and these skins hid away and counted as a measure of time passing. Interactions between Bloodworth, Gargantua, Toper and Slangam are brutal and bitchy. Imagine being stuck on an inhospitable island with three other law-breakers; a sack of potatoes, rice and rum the only provisions; the promise of rescue at least a year away. There is little to hope for except rescue. At least in a prison, your sentence, you would presume, would end. Here, on the island, the reader already knows that rescue is actually a decade away. And then what?
Gargantua believes he will be delivered as a hero to the literary circles of England, and that the story he has to tell of the experience will define him as ‘special’. Toper seems a bit stupid - his religion and natural inclination to follow rather than lead make him a prime candidate for manipulation. Slangam sees himself as boss, and so it is. Bloodworth eventually sours of interaction and heads out alone to a cave, rejecting company for penguin and albatross watching, and internal philosophising. ‘The Early Years’ and ‘The Middle Years’ follow these internal and external journeys.
It is in ‘Eternity’ that things dramatically change. We still have our narrator, but he has been thrown off a cliff and is slowly falling to his death. This is the smallest section of the book - 30 pages - but the most interesting as far as form goes. Randall has said that the idea of someone slowly falling to death is what prompted her writing The Bright Side of my Condition, and that this fitted well with the true historical story of the four Norfolk Island convicts. It is a surprising turn to what is, up to that point, a comfortable and fairly straightforward narrative. Bloodworth’s ‘eternal death’ seems to, perversely, happen quickly. He narrates the arrival of Captain Coffin and the rescue of the remaining three men. Things end as they start - the bickering and bitching continues, with all three trying to convince Coffin of the necessity of Bloodworth’s death.
And what of Bloodworth? As he falls and dies, he continues to grapple with the exquisite pain of living. At one point he asks: “But were there more of a plan for me? … Were I made special for a special life?” Randall’s response comes through words that swell from Bloodworth’s pre-convict life: “Living do the making.” We are as we choose to live, so choose to live wisely.
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