Lonely Napoleon finds a friend on 'Island'

After losing the Battle of Waterloo in the fall of 1815, Napoleon was banished to the small island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic. There, a man who once “directed the movements of hundreds of thousands of men and compelled the fealty of millions” lived out the last six years of his life, confined to parlors and drawing rooms.

Luckily for Napoleon, he met his spiritual match in 13-year-old Betsy Balcombe, a headstrong and charming English girl whose family played host to the exiled emperor, known among the island’s residents as “the ogre.” The two struck up an unlikely and fascinating friendship.

As he did in Schindler’s List (which won the Booker Prize in 1982), Keneally chooses a character on the sidelines to narrate his novel, and in Betsy readers will find the hallmarks of a classic, headstrong 19th-century heroine.

As he comes across in Betsy’s eyes, Napoleon is a childlike, whimsical figure, and whenever its two lead characters share a scene, Napoleon’s Last Island (Atria, 422 pp., **½ out of four stars) positively lights up. Watching these two intellects, both willful and sometimes cruel, dance around each other in their unusual circumstances makes for compelling reading. “I had particular knowledge of him,” Betsy tells us, “and of his impulse to play, fully as children play, inflicting pain as children do, and with the same fierce intent of children.”

Unfortunately, this electric core of the novel is often lost from view. Keneally’s painstaking research is apparent on each page, but it's allowed to run amok, leading to a pileup of historical references, name-dropping and lengthy digressions.

Historical fiction offers a great opportunity, as it did with Schindler’s List, to bring a new view to the past, adding a lens (such as a greater attunement to race, gender or sexuality) that fiction published in the period might be lacking. Aside from one flabbergasting scene at the end, Napoleon’s Last Island fully apes a novel that might have been written in the era, and the cost of such a historically authentic tone is a book that often feels labored and obtuse.

Our 13-year-old narrator tells us, for example, that her parents “were not the kind of people who exercised punishment by absenting themselves from the ritual of welcoming one of their children.” The mannered self-consciousness of Keneally's prose leads to a book with a guarded, distant feel, in which events are described rather than enacted. Given how epic its premise, Napoleon’s Last Island is curiously stagnant.

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Eliot Schrefer (Rescued) is a two-time finalist for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.