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Yet Rooke is also a gifted linguist, learning to speak five languages, including Greek and Latin.

He particularly likes prime numbers, : “Like him, they were solitaries.” To Rooke, mathematics is a language, as is all science. Others have had their names and character fictionalised too, including Commodore Arthur Phillip, Watkin Tench, Phillip’s ‘game keeper’ McIntyre, and all the aboriginal characters.Īs a young boy, Daniel Rooke is drawn to mathematics. The Lieutenant is based on the life of William Dawes, who sailed to New South Wales on the first fleet and set up Sydney’s first observatory on the point which now bears his name, though in Grenville’s fictionalised version of history, his name has been changed to Daniel Rooke. What a breath of fresh air this story was after slogging through Moby-Dick! The Lieutenant is the second of three historical novels set in colonial times in Sydney that Grenville has (or is) writing, the first of which was the much acclaimed The Secret River, and the third of which is due out later in 2011.