In the Company of Madness

In the Company of Madness is an Australian true-crime drama, set in Tasmania during the nineteenth-century convict transportation epidemic. The novel follows the parallel stories of three Irishmen: prisoner Alexander Pearce, priest Phillip Conolly, and soldier John Cuthbertson. Brought together under uncanny circumstances, the novel explores how each character occupied a vastly different social role—criminal, captor, confessor—despite their similar nativity. The story uses the commonalities between these characters as a means of investigating the social causes that determine an individual’s path in life. The three characters learn that so long as there are people who inherit the attitudes of previous generations, the systems that oppress continue to exist. The story uses the lives of real characters to explore how fatalism persists in human society, and questions what must change in punishment and reformation before the cycle of systematic oppression and subsequent incarceration can be broken.