Joseph Connor was a schoolteacher in Currabubula, a small town on Gomeroi country in northern New South Wales, in the 1880s. He was accused of viciously beating children — one lost a finger — but nothing was ever proved. His wife died after 11 pregnancies. Then he died too. The archives hold letters, reports, and transcripts but no clear answers, and Grenville, whose grandmother grew up in this town, found the story impossible to leave alone. What she's built from the material is something she calls an 'odd hybrid' — not a novel, not history, but a first-person detective exercise in reading between archival lines. All names, including Connor's, have been changed, because Grenville didn't want to 'play god' with real people's lives by deciding, even fictionally, who did what. The result is a book that invites the reader to play detective alongside the author, weighing suspicious omissions against neighborly grudges, parsing a man's 'graceless' posture in a photograph for character evidence. At its best, this approach is genuinely fun — gossipy and gripping, like time-traveling into a particularly juicy thread on a teachers' forum, as the review puts it. Grenville's eye for period detail is sharp, and the flashes of imagined life — a rare playful moment between Connor's exhausted wife and daughter amid nappies and croup — show the novel this book might have been. The cold-case format earns its keep when Grenville reaches a 'final' position about Connor, only to uncover new information that overturns it entirely. The friction comes from tonal inconsistency. The same narrator who refers to pig manure as 'poop' and cheerfully identifies as 'a bit of a tree planter myself' suddenly imagines the dark 'exhilaration' of Connor delivering a backhand slap to a child's face. It's a jarring gear-change, and it exposes a tension in the book's project: Grenville's forensic fascination with the physical specifics of corporal punishment sits uneasily alongside her otherwise jovial register. This isn't voyeurism exactly, but it's uncomfortably close. The more substantial problem is what the book doesn't do. Grenville leads with a short paragraph on the Gomeroi people and briefly wonders, prompted by a 'very white' school photograph, whether Aboriginal students were excluded under the period's racist exclusion-by-demand policy. Then she drops it. For an author professionally committed to reckoning with settler accountability — whose career includes The Secret River and A Room Made of Leaves — spending a decade imaginatively inhabiting this school community without seriously exploring the education system's role as a tool of dispossession and assimilation is a notable gap. Grenville implies the archives don't yield enough material for fuller Aboriginal characters. That may be true. But the question of what was done to Aboriginal children in and around Currabubula is not a minor subplot; it's the larger violence within which Connor's smaller violence either matters or doesn't. The book's explicit thesis — that making up your mind irrevocably about anything is 'dangerous,' and that dogged uncertainty is a metaphor for our oversimplified political moment — arrives as a didactic coda that feels slightly unearned. Grenville is too good a writer not to know that a historical novelist expressing 'shock' at the elusiveness of archival truth is performing naivety. The uncertainty is real; the shock is a rhetorical move. None of which makes The Country Schoolmaster a bad book. It's sharp, readable, and often quietly funny, and Grenville's command of the archive-as-narrative-material is hard-won and evident on every page. But it's a minor work from a major writer — valuable for what it demonstrates about method, limited by what it chooses not to examine.
