Robert Benjamin Rex Verhagen

In the Company of Madness Robert Benjamin Rex Verhagen

The untold story of Australia's most notorious convict.

In the Company of Madness is a historical fiction novel set in 1820s Van Diemen's Land. Crime and punishment define the lives of soldier John Cuthbertson, prisoner Alexander Pearce and priest Phillip Conolly. By fate, choice or circumstance these three men, born 18 miles apart, are transported to the ends of the earth, where they act as captor, convict and confessor to one another. Each of them attempts to carve out lives that make their arduous journeys to Australia worthwhile.

Haunted by his Roman Catholic upbringing, Alexander strives to leave his past in Ireland behind. However, through a series of bad decisions and unfortunate circumstances, he ends up absconding from government work to live with bushrangers. When a government pardon goes wrong, Alexander finds himself transported to the most remote place of banishment in the colony: Macquarie Harbour.

Lieutenant John Cuthbertson is an Irish Protestant soldier who desires one thing above all else: promotion. With promotion, he may cleanse his lowly Irish name of its stain. He is given the task of establishing the colony's first prison for secondary offenders at Macquarie Harbour, but he struggles to forget Ireland when he must contend with recalcitrant Irish prisoners, like Alexander Pearce.

Reverend Phillip Conolly takes the commission to be Van Diemen's Land's first Catholic priest. Alas, the religious segregation and racism he hoped to abandon has followed him. When he is called to be the confessor of a condemned Irish convict named Alexander Pearce, Phillip is flawed to learn they were born in the same county. He does not know if he can damn Pearce in the eyes of the public, but save him in the eyes of God - furthermore, he wonders how two infants born in Ireland could grow up to become such different men in Van Diemen's Land.

In the Company of Madness interrogates the forces greater than free will: politics, religion and the natural world. Woven into its gothic fabric are themes of the fatalism of human striving, only to fall short; the best intentions at the worst moment; fate and individual agency; and crime and punishment. It uses the lives of real people to understand how social ladders are assembled and why, and begs the question: is it fate or something else that charts the courses of our lives?