Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Remembering Babylon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Xenophobia
Gender and Power
Community and Insularity
Coming of Age
Colonialism and Property
Summary
Analysis
George Abbot is only 19, though he gives the impression of being in his mid-twenties by his stern demeanor, his habits of a much older man, and his refusal to recognize his own youth in any manner whatsoever. George despises Australia and the roughness of the settlers and the isolation of his position, feeling that it does not give credit to his own “fineness” and “high prospects,” though a part of him recognizes such things are thin illusions. His demeanor keeps him isolated, despised by the other boy his age and embarrassed by the girls, so he takes out his repressed anger by being severe to his young students, beating them for wrong answers or misbehaviors. Such violence makes him feel briefly relieved until the their looks of pain fill him with shame and sadness.
Like Jock and especially Lachlan, George is established as a man with illusions of grandeur. Although George’s fantasies are less about the power to dominate and more about his intellectual and cultural prowess, the resulting insecurity and delusional grasp of reality are the same. It is revealing, then, that George takes out his frustrations with himself and his predicament through violence towards his young students, suggesting that even for a man of such supposed refinement, the base instinct for violence is dormant as the easiest way to feel briefly powerful and in control.
Themes
George “never meant to come to Australia.” As a child, he lives a privileged life with a fine education funded by his eccentric godfather, Mr. Robertson, who dotes on him and gives him gifts. Although he is a quick and charming child, as he grows older, his charm seems childish and people pay less attention to him; “the beginnings of a terrible plainness began to declare itself.” Cousin Alisdair, who is obsessed with appearance and aesthetics, subsequently begins to ignore him, though still funding his education.
Like Lachlan, George struggles with the fact that, despite his childish conviction of his own greatness, the rest of the world has no particular interest in him. George’s physical plainness, apparent already, foreshadows the general mediocrity that will define his life and trajectory, and that George will eventually be forced to make peace with in order to mature.
Themes
George, disenchanted with his own life, begins to dream of exploring Africa, feeling that the harshness of the continent would refine his plain self into the greatness he feels he is destined for. When he brings his request to Mr. Robertson as a young man, his benefactor instead insists that he go to Australia, which is just beginning to be settled, and where the land is fertile and rich by all reports.
George’s belief that suffering will make him a great man is only an extension of the childish delusion that he is destined for greatness. Rather than accept that he is a person like any other among the masses, George casts the blame for his mediocrity on the notion that he simply hasn’t suffered enough, though this notion will also be challenged later in the story.
Themes
Instead, George’s life in Australia is “desolate, without hope,” and mean to him. While he believed Africa “would have tempered his soul to hardness,” Australia simply causes him to languish with its clammy heat and dull people. When the McIvor children bring Gemmy to school, George strictly forbids it, partly in revulsion to Gemmy but also because he resents Lachlan, who is sharp, quick, and easily his best student. Lachlan also yearns for the affection of his elders, and so George pointedly and pettily refuses it, even mocking Lachlan for always having Gemmy around, until “it [becomes] Lachlan who now [keeps] Gemmy away.”
It is revealing that George comes to despise Lachlan for his sharp wit and eagerness to please and be praised, since Lachlan seems a mirror image of George as child, and not altogether different from George as a young adult. George thus unwittingly condemns his own behavior by scorning Lachlan and demonstrates a notable lack of maturity and self-awareness, unable to recognize that he himself exhibits traits he despises in other people.
Themes
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