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WORK TITLE: THE BOOK OF SCIENCE AND ANTIQUITIES
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NATIONALITY: Australian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 299
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Keneally * http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/03/shame-captives-thomas-keneally-review-compelling-japanese-outback
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PERSONAL
Born October 7, 1935, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; son of Edmund Thomas and Elsie Margaret Keneally; married Judith Martin, August 15, 1965; children: Margaret Ann, Jane Rebecca.
EDUCATION:Studied at St. Patrick’s College, New South Wales.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Trained for priesthood (never ordained); high-school teacher in Sydney, Australia, 1960-64; University of New England, New South Wales, Australia, lecturer in drama, 1968-70; University of California, Irvine, School of Writing, visiting professor, 1985, distinguished professor, 1991-95; New York University, New York, NY, inaugural Berg Professor, 1988. Australia-China Council member, 1978-88; Australian Constitutional Committee adviser, 1985-88; Literary Arts Board of Australia member, 1985-88; Australian Republican Movement chair, 1991-93, director, 1994—. Actor in films, including The Devil’s Playground, 1976, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1978.
MIILITARY:Served in Australian Citizens Military Forces.
MEMBER:Australian Society of Authors (chair, 1987-90), National Book Council of Australia (president, 1985-90).
AWARDS:PEN, Royal Society of Literature (fellow), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow); Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship, 1966, 1968, 1972; Miles Franklin Award, 1968, for Bring Larks and Heroes, 1969, for Three Cheers for the Paraclete; Captain Cook Bicentenary Prize, 1970; shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1972, for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1975, for Gossip from the Forest, 1979, for Confederates; Heinemann Award, Royal Society of Literature, 1973, for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith; notable book citation, American Library Association, 1980, for Confederates; Booker Prize for fiction and Los Angeles Times fiction prize, both 1982, both for Schindler’s List; named Officer, Order of Australia, 1983; Fred Hollows Award, Eritrean Development Foundation, 2003; Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, Tulsa Library Trust, 2007; Special Award, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, 2008; Australia Council Award for lifetime achievement in literature, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributing writer, Our Sunburnt Country (Australian television series). Also author of the introduction to The Eureka Stockade, by Raffaello Carboni, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria, Australia, 1993. Contributor to screenplays, including The Priest, 1973; and Silver City, 1985. Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times Book Review and Bulletin.
Our Country’s Good, was adapted as the play The Playmaker by Timberlake Wertenbaker, 1989; Schindler’s List was adapted for film by Steven Zaillian for Amblin Entertainment, 1993.
SIDELIGHTS
Well known for his novel Schindler’s Ark, which served as the basis for the award-winning motion picture Schindler’s List in 1993, Thomas Keneally has become one of Australia’s most distinguished authors. In works characterized by their sensitivity to style, their objectivity, their suspense, and their diversity, the author has explored subjects as diverse as the history of his native Australia, life under a military dictatorship, and the life of a Catholic priest.
Discussions of Keneally often emphasize his years spent as a seminary student and his last-minute decision not to take the vows of priesthood, yet only two of his novels focus directly on the subject. In Three Cheers for the Paraclete, published in 1968, his protagonist is Father James Maitland, a man who has doubts and questions about his faith and encounters problems in a Sydney seminary. As in many of his novels, Keneally presents his characters objectively and compassionately; priests and bishops are seen in the fullness of their humanity. Richard Sullivan wrote in the Washington Post Book World: “Though this admirably sustained novel makes it clear that some structures are too rigid, that the Church is not unflawed in its members, both clerical and lay, and that more windows need opening, at the same time it reveals with fine objectivity that it is human beings who are at fault, each in his own way, Maitland as much as any.” More than thirty years later, Keneally again featured a priest in his novel Office of Innocence.
A similar example of Keneally’s desire for objectivity is evident in his version of the story of Joan of Arc, Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans. Bruce Cook in the Washington Post Book World claimed Keneally’s “intent, in fact, seems to be to reduce her and her legend to recognizably human dimensions.” Placing Keneally’s Joan of Arc in a historical perspective, Time contributor Melvin Maddocks saw her standing between the “Joan-too-spiritual” of the original legend and the “Joan-too-earthy” of George Bernard Shaw. She is “less spectacular than the first two but decidedly more convincing and perhaps, at last, more moving.”
Perhaps Keneally’s most ambitious historical novel is Confederates, set during the American Civil War and told from a Southern perspective. The book has no central character but rather focuses on a group of characters who are involved in the preparations for the Second Battle of Antietam, fought in 1862. Keneally “keeps his canvas as vast as possible,” wrote John Higgins in the Times Literary Supplement, “and his concern is as much with the conscripts as with the captains; the volunteers get just as large a show as the likes of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.”
Several critics found Keneally’s portrayal of the American South in Confederates surprisingly realistic. Jeffrey Burke in the New York Times Book Review, for example, wrote that it “is almost necessary to remind oneself that the author is Australian, so naturally, intrinsically Southern is the narrative voice.” Robert Ostermann, writing in the Detroit News, stated that Keneally’s account of the Second Battle of Antietam “deserves comparison … to Tolstoy’s rendering of the Russian defeat and retreat at Borodino and to Hemingway’s of the retreat from Caporetto in A Farewell to Arms” and added that “the fact that this massive, absorbing narrative is the work of an Australian—not a Southerner, not even a native American—testifies even further to the stature of his achievement.”
With the release of Schindler’s List, published in England as Schindler’s Ark, Keneally found himself embroiled in a controversy over whether his book was fiction or nonfiction, an important point since the book was nominated for England’s prestigious Booker McConnell Prize for fiction. Although the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist during World War II who saved the Jews assigned to work in his factory from Nazi gas chambers, is historical truth, Keneally wrote the book as a novel. After deliberation, the judges deemed the work acceptable to the competition and awarded it the Booker Prize in 1982.
The controversy over Schindler’s List is understandable, for the real-life story of Oskar Schindler is strange indeed. The owner of a German armaments factory staffed with forced Jewish laborers from nearby concentration camps, Schindler made a fortune during the war by supplying the German army with war materials. But when the Nazi regime decided to solve the “Jewish question” through mass extermination of Jewish prisoners, Schindler acted to save as many of his workers as possible. He persuaded the local S.S. chief to allow him to house his Jewish workers in a compound built on his factory grounds rather than at a concentration camp. Through the use of bribes and favors, Schindler worked to reunite his workers with their families, provided them with adequate food and medical care, and even managed to get a particularly murderous S.S. officer transferred to the Russian front. When the Russian army threatened to capture the area of southern Poland where Schindler’s factory was located—and the German army made plans to execute the Jewish workers before retreating—Schindler moved his company and his workers to safety in German-held Czechoslovakia. By the end of the war, Schindler had some thirteen hundred Jewish workers under his protection—far more than he needed to operate his factory—and had spent his entire fortune on bribes and favors.
Critical reaction to Schindler’s List was generally favorable. Keneally, according to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, “does not attempt to analyze in detail whatever made Oskar Schindler tick,” which the reviewer found “a little disconcerting, considering the novelistic technique he employs to tell his story. But this restraint increases the book’s narrative integrity. Because the story doesn’t try to do what it can’t honestly do, we trust all the more what it does do.” In the Washington Post Book World, Jonathan Yardley felt that the book’s major flaw is “the author’s insistence on employing devices of the ‘new’ journalism.” Yardley added: “But Schindler’s List has about it a strong, persuasive air of authenticity, and as an act of homage it is a most emphatic and powerful document.”
In A Family Madness, Keneally again returns to World War II, this time exploring its repercussions upon later generations. The book was inspired by a real-life tragedy in Sydney during the summer of 1984, in which a family of five willingly ended their lives. The author’s rugby-playing protagonist, Terry Delaney, goes to work for a security firm owned by a Byelorussian named Rudi Kabbel. Haunted by traumatic memories of his childhood in Russia during the war and his father’s wartime journals, which reveal countless horrors inflicted upon his family, Kabbel has become mentally unstable. When Delaney, who is married, falls in love with Kabbel’s daughter and fathers her child, the Kabbel family closes ranks—not only against Delaney but against the world. As Blake Morrison explained in the London Observer: “They sell up the business, surround themselves with heavy weaponry, and wait for the new dawn.”
Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Wood stated that A Family Madness conveys the idea that “even here, in this comfort-loaded and forward-looking Australia, history will get you one way or another.” Wood praised the novel, calling it “an ambitious and successful book that makes connections we need to think about.” John Sutherland, a contributor to the London Review of Books, lauded the novel as “better than its applauded predecessor,” Schindler’s List, and noted that the nobility of the characters makes a genuine claim on the reader. However, New York Times Book Review correspondent Robert Towers criticized Keneally’s characterization, writing that “the lack of an adequately realized psychological dimension” in the character of Rudi Kabbel “is … crippling to the novel’s aspirations.”
With the publication of To Asmara: A Novel of Africa, as with Schindler’s List, Keneally found himself once again accused of writing not a novel but an impassioned journalistic tribute. A fictionalized portrayal of the brutal African guerilla warfare of the 1980s, To Asmara focuses on the struggle of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front to break free from an Ethiopia dominated by tyrants. Assisted by Russian military aid, the Ethiopian army was permitted to commit a form of genocide against the Eritreans, in the course of which Ethiopian troops destroyed the beautiful ancient city of Asmara.
New York Times Book Review writer Robert Stone had high praise for To Asmara: “Not since For Whom the Bell Tolls has a book of such sophistication, the work of a major international novelist, spoken out so unambiguously on behalf of an armed struggle.” In contrast, Andrew Jaffe, reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, took issue with Keneally’s advocacy of the Eritrean cause. Jaffe wrote: “The nobility of the rebels shouldn’t be the concern of the novelist. His job is to sketch an intriguing story against an exotic backdrop. Keneally forgot to leave his commitment to the cause behind in Port Sudan.”
Keneally has also written several novels under the pseudonym of William Coyle. In Firestorm, published in 1988, he tells the story of Bernard Reardon, an Australian tail gunner who takes part in the infamous Dresden firebombing raid and begins to question the morality of what he has done. A parallel story focuses on Bernard’s sibling, an Australian Roman Catholic nun named Sister Perpetua, who ultimately renounces her vows after facing lesbianism, sexual harassment, and bullying while in the convent. Samuel Hynes, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented on the fact that the publisher acknowledges that Coyle is a pseudonym for a successful writer. Hynes went on to note: “ Firestorm is a serious, straightforward novel, and I can see no way in which it would compromise the reputation of the person who wrote it. So come out, William Coyle, and identify yourself.”
Keneally uncharacteristically moved away from the sweeping panoramas of his earlier fiction and limited the action to the confines of one airplane in Flying Hero Class. Frank McCloud, tour manager for a troupe of Australian aboriginal dancers, finds himself involved in a hijacking on a flight from New York to Frankfurt following the troupe’s performance. Describing Flying Hero Class as a “thoughtful and exciting novel,” Richard Lipez pointed out in the Washington Post Book World that Keneally examines with ease two complex issues: the issue of Israeli security versus Palestinian justice and the issue of the territorial rights of the Australian aboriginal tribe versus U.S. and international mining interests. Although he found some fault with the novel, Edward Hower, writing in the New York Times Book Review noted: “Keneally’s people are fascinating, and so are the ideas his plot generates, making the hijacking a metaphor for the complex relationship between the West and the third world peoples deprived of land and dignity.” Hower also wrote that “ Flying Hero Class gives original insights into the way one man learns to reclaim responsibility for his own fate.”
With Woman of the Inner Sea, Keneally returns to his native Australian turf and bases his plot on a real-life incident. In the story, Kate Gaffney-Kozinski, the wife of a wealthy construction-empire scion, loses her husband to another woman and her two precious children to the fire that levels the family’s expensive beach home near Sydney. In an effort to forget, Kate boards a train for the interior. The place Kate chooses for her “self-annihilation” is Myambagh, a town built on the hard, flat rock of what was once an immense inland sea. Donna Rifkind, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, wrote that the Australian outback, “with its miles of empty red earth, stringybark and eucalyptus, savage storms and eccentric wildlife, represents more than just external landscape.” Rifkind went on to write: “The fluid unpredictability of the land also mirrors Kate’s transformation.” Rifkind further noted that through “the tragedy of her dead children and her subsequent pilgrimage, Kate represents a nation on a perpetual search for reinvention, a nation hardened by countless histories of hunger, tough luck and untimely death.” Susan Fromberg Schaeffer commented in the New York Times Book Review: “ Woman of the Inner Sea succeeds on many fronts. It is a picaresque and often hilarious adventure story, recounting one woman’s unforgettable if improbable travels. It is a series of love stories … and it is a mystery story as well. But the novel is also very much an exploration of ethics.”
Drawing on his family background once more, Keneally’s novel A River Town deals with his Irish grandparents’ immigration to Australia. In A River Town, Keneally relates the experiences of a turn-of-the-century Irishman, Tim Shea, who journeys to Australia when he tires of the confining mores of his own country. However, while happy to be rid of the restraints he experienced in Ireland, Tim discovers through a series of adverse events many of the same problems with the social conventions of the Australian frontier. In his new hometown of Kempsey, New South Wales, Tim becomes a community hero when he rescues two children from a cart accident. Shortly after, he finds himself being ostracized by the same community for his opposition to the Boer War—a position that ends in near economic disaster for Tim and his family when town members boycott his general store. As unfortunate events continue to plague Tim, he uncovers more of the very same social conventions he had hoped to leave behind in Ireland.
In general, critics were impressed with A River Town. “This is truly a compassionate novel, full of vividly portrayed outcasts,” wrote reviewer David Willis McCullough in the New York Times Book Review. McCullough noted that the characters are “outsiders in a nation of outsiders who are only beginning to define themselves in their new home, people who thought that ‘if they traveled 12,000 miles, they might outrun original sin.’” Also finding the novel full of compassion and featuring a well-depicted historical background, a Publishers Weekly contributor noted: “The story is haunting because it is both commonplace and universal. Keneally looks clearly at moral rot, but he is cautiously optimistic about the survival of good people and the uplifting heritage they bequeath.” “Keneally has marvelous descriptive powers,” stated Detroit News contributor Barbara Holiday, who praised the author’s ability to “[bring] the community alive.” Holiday summarized: “Keneally has written an absorbing homespun account of ordinary people who are heroic in spite of themselves.”
Keneally once again called on his experience in the seminary when he wrote Office of Innocence, a novel published in 2002. In this story, he follows the daily life of Father Frank Durragh, a young Catholic priest who serves a parish near Sydney during World War II. Worldly enough to realize that not everyone respects his vocation, he is nevertheless faithful and devout. Frank is reprimanded by his superior for inviting scandal through his involvement with a deserter from the American military and with Kate Haggerty, a married woman whose husband is a prisoner of war. The small-mindedness and the suspicions cast upon him by his parishioners are disturbing, and Frank even contemplates running off and taking Kate with him. When a horrible murder is committed, Frank is considered a suspect in the crime; he has, in fact, heard the real murderer’s confession and must do what he can to persuade the killer to turn himself in without breaking the seal of the confessional. Reviewing the book in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Geoff Campbell called it “a moving novel that perfectly captures a man of faith struggling with his own humanity and a stifling and disinterested church leadership. Keneally clearly burnishes his reputation as a master storyteller.” Campbell further stated that the novel’s “tight plot” combines with the author’s “delicate yet muscular prose” to create a fictional “powerhouse.” Office of Innocence may lack the sweep of Schindler’s List, but “it is a sterling effort on a smaller scale,” remarked a Publishers Weekly writer.
The Tyrant’s Novel has some similarity to Schindler’s List in that it depicts people struggling to survive and retain their moral center in the midst of a totalitarian regime. The central character is a writer, Alan Sheriff. Although the names are all Anglicized, the country bears a strong resemblance to Iraq, and Alan is approached by the “Great Uncle,” a dictator who seems closely akin to Saddam Hussein. There is great poverty and political unrest in his country, but Alan is a member of the cultural elite and has always felt immune to the troubles of his lower-class countrymen. He is unable to maintain his detachment after the Great Uncle enlists him to ghostwrite a book for propaganda purposes. If the book is not produced in one month, and if it does not meet the approval of the Great Uncle, Alan will be executed. As he struggles to meet his deadline, Alan finds himself writing truths that will certainly be unacceptable to the Great Uncle. A Publishers Weekly writer noted that Keneally does a fine job of finding the humanity in all his characters, even the cruel ones. He also handles well the scenario of an artist struggling to stay true to himself, giving Alan’s tale “real depth and pathos.” The reviewer wrote: “This is an exquisitely wrought study of moral corruption.” Reviewing the book in Time, Richard Lacayo surmised that using Anglicized names for the Middle Eastern characters was the author’s “brilliantly simple” way of making the story more real to Western readers, forcing them to identify with his protagonists.
“This is a fast, complex, and intelligent novel,” stated John R. Coyne, Jr., in National Review. “Keneally is not an easy man. He is politically and philosophically unclassifiable, a happily married failed priest who often thinks and feels in his novels like a confessor, an Irish Australian who combines at least in prose some of the attributes of those nationalities—combativeness, sentimentality, distrust of authority, distaste for pretence, humor, wit, irony—with the ability to write clear, compressed, sharp, and singing prose. All these elements and more inform this fine, extraordinarily imaginative novel.”
Bettany’s Book tells the story of Prim and Dimp, two Australian sisters from an upper-class family. However, their lives change when Dimp discovers the diary of their great-grandfather, which recounts the life of John Bettany and an aboriginal boy he adopted after the boy’s mother was murdered by her white lover. The boy, renamed Felix Bettany, proves to be a genius but eventually must go on the run. He ends up in Southeast Asia and becomes a successful businessman. Justine Ettler, writing in the New Statesman, observed that Bettany’s Book “has a strong political message and sense of justice.”
Keneally’s novel An Angel in Australia revolves around Frank Darragh, a curate in a parish west of Sydney. The curate must deal with his overbearing superior, Monsignor Carolan, and his numerous parishioners, who are losing loved ones overseas in the war and fear that the Japanese will soon mount a large invasion of Australia. Frank eventually finds himself in a crisis of faith as he begins to question the ethical doctrines of the mother church, which, for example, sees the moral fiber of the nation crumbling as Australian women, many of them married, succumb to the charms of American servicemen stationed in Australia.
“Keneally surveys these conundrums in an expertly constructed narrative and in terms of vividly depicted characters; and he demonstrates admirable skill throughout, not the least the ability to convey mood and atmosphere, landscapes and cityscapes with deft brushstrokes,” wrote Andrew Riemer in the Sydney Morning Herald. Magdalena Ball, writing on the Aussie Reviews website, noted: “There is something to be said for plain, clean narrative, with no tricks, no fancy poetry, twists or multiple time sequences.”
In the 2007 novel The Widow and Her Hero, Keneally tells a tragic story of lost love during World War II. In the novel, the author presents two narrators. Grace tells her story as she explains to her granddaughter what life was like during World War II. She meets Captain Leo Waterhouse, falls in love, and eventually marries him. However, Leo is sent on a dangerous commando mission and is captured by the Japanese, never to return. Interspersed with Grace’s story are Leo’s memoirs, which he wrote in a prisoner of war camp. Grace, however, has received the memoir many years later. Commenting on the novel in an interview reprinted on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website, the author mused: “He is a hero, but is he a hero?” Keneally went on to point out: “For the rest of her life she is settling a version of what happened to him and coming to terms with it when another male emerges with a new version saying things like, ‘I never wanted to tell this, forgive me, I’ve got this journal which I’ve kept since then.’ And throughout her life, due to the guilt, generally, of other men, including a Japanese interpreter, she is having to readjust the picture of what she thought happened.”
Although The Widow and Her Hero is a work of fiction, it is based on real-life events, specifically two covert operations. Just as in the novel, the first was a success. However, the second, known as Operation Rimau, was a failure that led to either the death or the capture and subsequent execution of all the soldiers involved. “One wonders: why not just write a history and have done with it?,” asked Ed Lake in the London Times. Lake added: “But this would miss his purpose. The desperate heroics of [Operation] Memerang are pieced together by Waterhouse’s young bride, Grace, and narrated half a century after the event, at the end of a life etiolated by uncertainty. We get the story behind the story.” A Spectator contributor wrote that the author “merges historical veracity with psychologically convincing fiction,” adding later in the same review: “This is a dignified and thoughtful account of a generation obliged to be valiant.”
In 2012 Keneally published The Daughters of Mars. Sisters Sally and Naomi Durance take turns narrating the story as they work as nurses during World War I. Called up to the front lines to help badly injured soldiers in Europe, the sisters have recently come from a dark place in their lives, having recently agreed to euthanatize their long-suffering mother.
Writing in the London Guardian, Jay Parini speculated: “Not quite knowing how to conclude the novel, Keneally offers a peculiar, bifurcated ending that doesn’t work. But in truth this doesn’t matter. This is a novel on an epic scale: its plenitude and anguish are life-enhancing, and the huge talents of Thomas Keneally are everywhere on display.” Reviewing the novel on the National Public Radio website, Jean Zimmerman observed that “Keneally’s prose gets across the private thoughts, terrible fears and hard-won joys of young women in harrowing circumstances. It reveals the up-close realities of the teeming casualty clearing stations, a soldier’s face ‘shorn off,’ the specific types of gas that were just then being unleashed on the soldiers.” In a review in the London Independent, James Urquhart found that “at times, Naomi is quietly but not mutinously outspoken about the incompetence of the generals governing military and medical strategy; but there’s no undertow of redemption or moralising in The Daughters of Mars. Keneally more readily offers a perplexed long look at the panorama of agony, and a close observation of the moral resilience of his characters under duress.”
Keneally published Shame and the Captives in 2013. English colonel Ewan Abercare and Australian major Bernard Suttor bicker over how best to deal with unruly Japanese POWs being held at a camp in remote Australia during World War II. Eventually the Japanese escape from the camp and take over a nearby farm, where Alice, her father-in-law, and an Italian POW assigned to work at the farm as forced labor are based.
In a review in the London Guardian, Alfred Hickling remarked that “though the Australian characters are clearly more than ‘marginally human’, Keneally nonetheless presents a group of flawed, jaded figures condemned to marginal lives.” Reviewing the novel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pamela Miller suggested that “the mercy-loathing Japanese are so harshly drawn that this novel is likely to cause a collective cringe in Japan, where there has been plenty of soul-searching since this horrific era.” Writing in Library Journal, Edward B. Cone said that the novel is “highly recommended to all who appreciate a historical work told with great perception and insight.”
In 2016 Keneally published the novel Napoleon’s Last Island. The novel begins in 1815 when Napoleon is exiled to the South Atlantic island of St. Helena. He takes up residence with East India Company representative William Balcombe while waiting for his house to be completed. While most on the island find Napoleon to be pleasant, Balcombe’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy, is more skeptical. The island’s new governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, decides to restrict Napoleon’s lifestyle and pleasures, additionally punishing the Balcombes for having good relations with him. Betsy comes to see her family in a new light over the course of the unfolding events.
Writing in Library Journal, James Coan noticed that “the novel as told by Betsy has accurately reproduced the diction of a 19th-century writer.” Booklist contributor Margaret Flanagan stated: “Loosely based on actual events and real-life historical figures,” Napoleon’s Last Island “makes for a deeply intriguing, if somewhat fanciful, read.” A Publishers Weekly contributor mentioned that the author “adapts his style to suit his subject matter, and here the high formality of 19th-century journal-keeping helps bring alive the bittersweet last days of Napoleon.”
Keneally published the novel Crimes of the Father in 2017. Father Frank Docherty returns to his native Australia in 1990 after having been banished for his views on the war in Vietnam and apartheid earlier in his career. He is appalled when he learns how the Australian Catholic Church has dealt with reported cases of sexual abuse by its priests. He seeks out the victims of a colleague of his while pondering issues of morality and struggling with his own faith.
Booklist contributor Bridget Thoreson concluded that “the result is stunning and heartrending, a work of fiction that has the terrible ring of truth.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews commented that “Keneally’s earnest effort to encompass the many legal and religious facets of this issue unfortunately results in more of an agenda than a novel.” A Publishers Weekly contributor explained that “while the subject matter is timely and relevant … the novel comes across as closer to essay than effective narrative.” A contributor reviewing the novel in the Spectator observed that Keneally’s “reputation appears to have settled down into that of a solid craftsman: the sort of novelist who rarely lets you down, but who never quite hits the literary heights either,” which was responded to be calling him “badly underrated.” The same Spectator reviewer claimed that “in the end, there’s still no denying that this is fundamentally an issue-driven book. Nonetheless, the force and resonance of the issue in question–together with Keneally’s wise and thoughtful treatment of it–make for another hugely satisfying read from one of the world’s great writers.”
In 2019 Keneally published The Book of Science and Antiquities. The book offers parallel stories that deal with issues of morality and humanity. Aging filmmaker Shelby Apple must deal with his cancer diagnosis. Meanwhile, set 42,000 years before the current era, Learned Man attempts to make sense of the justice of the gods that he must enforce on his people and their environment.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews reasoned that “dedicated readers might excavate nuggets of wisdom, but most will wonder if the expedition was worth it.” A Publishers Weekly contributor lamented that “both characters remain underdeveloped and Learned Man’s narrative is delivered in dry prose.” Nevertheless, the reviewer found the premise of the book to be “intriguing.” Writing in the London Guardian, Beejay Silcox pondered: “Is The Book of Science and Antiquities a sly existential joke, or an entirely solemn endeavour? It’s billed as the latter, as Keneally’s most candid work of fiction to date, a kind of grand human hymn. But there’s a wink or two that suggests he is chuckling into the cosmic void.” Reviewing the book in Herald Scotland, Hugh MacDonald pointed out that “Keneally invites the reader ‘to gaze calmly on the limitless sea of death.’ In a book that teems with journeys and voyages, both spiritual and physical, he finds something true, brave and powerful to say about mankind’s fate. He has danced with death and produced something invigorating.” Writing in the Financial Times, William Skidelsky concluded that “the resulting novel is a mixed bag. There is a sense of too many elements—both narrative and thematic—being shoehorned in. Some of Shelby’s reminiscences feel irrelevant, as if Keneally has included them mainly to fill space, or because they mirror the author’s own experiences…. And yet these flaws are redeemed, to a large extent, by the sheer enjoyableness of the Shade chapters.”
While reviews of his fiction have been generally favorable, several of Keneally’s works of nonfiction have been received with less enthusiasm. In Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish, for example, the author attempts to describe the land of his grandparents. “Dazzled by his adventure” in Ireland, wrote Katharine Weber in the New York Times Book Review, “Keneally fails to discern what is significant and what is not.” Many critics would agree that the novel is Keneally’s forte. His impressive body of fiction, as Schaeffer wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “makes convincing the very serious belief that each of us has a necessary place—and that our most important task is to find it.”
Keneally’s subsequent nonfiction works received considerable praise, however. The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New, published in the United States as The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, received high marks from Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com. Williams considered the book compelling because of “the smoothness with which the author moves around the globe. Observing both the rooted and the scattered, he shows not just how the outside world affected the Irish, but also how the Irish changed the world.” Williams called Keneally’s “greatest gift … his flair for molding real events into memorable narratives, in the smart turns of phrase that draw the reader into the action.”
One of the figures in The Great Shame was later featured in another book, American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles. Times Literary Supplement contributor Benjamin Markovits called Sickles “a characteristic object of Keneally’s curiosity, a man, like Oskar Schindler, who exhibited the often uneasy relation between public and private virtues. Sickles, again like Schindler, excelled at the particulars of political life, at details and connections—like Keneally himself, whose talents as a writer reflect the qualities that draw him to his subjects.”
Biographies of Abraham Lincoln abound, but in Keneally’s Abraham Lincoln, he touches on undocumented moments, and as New York Times Book Review contributor David Walton noted, “the droll and unusual image.” Walton called this an “excellent brief biography.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor deemed Keneally’s look at Lincoln “so fresh that one wishes only that the ‘Penguin Lives’ format afforded Keneally room to say more about this iconic leader. Exemplary and illuminating, even for readers well-versed in Lincolniana.”
Keneally’s A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia opens with the image of eleven ships that, in 1788, crossed the seas from England, packed with convicts who would be set ashore in Australia to relieve the overcrowding of England’s jails. The effect of this action on the aborigines of Australia, the events of the first five years of the convict colony, and the heritage they passed on to the country that developed from these settlers, are all explored in Keneally’s history. The book is “thoroughly researched, artfully written, engaging and instructive,” reported a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Gilbert Taylor, reviewing A Commonwealth of Thieves in Booklist, praised the author for his vivid depiction of the continent’s history and noted that his book is “vibrant and fluent.”
In Our Republic, published in 1993, the author presents his belief that Australia should be established as a republic. He writes about the history of Australian thought concerning the monarchy and the empire and discusses how modern Australian attitudes have changed. “ Our Republic is one of the most important books about Australia since Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, and quite possibly a blueprint for Australia’s future,” wrote Bradley Kenneth Webb on the History Essays website.
In Searching for Schindler: A Memoir, Keneally tells the story behind his novel Schindler’s List. He recounts how a chance meeting led him to write about Oskar Schindler and details how he gathered the material for his book. He discusses the lives of the people he interviewed who survived Nazi persecution because of Schindler and also explores how the success of the book and the subsequent film based on it has affected his life. “The strength of this work … is the stories of the survivors,” wrote Jay Freeman Booklist. USA Today contributor Don Oldenburg noted: “Hollywood anecdotes about Spielberg and the film’s stars, including Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes, provide a fascinating insider view of how movies are made.”
Keneally wrote the multivolume Australians, beginning with Origins to Eureka in 2009 and continuing with Eureka to the Diggers in 2011. Three Famines: Starvation and Politics, which was also published in 2011, explores the 1845 Irish potato famine, the 1943 Bengal famine, and the famine in Ethiopia that stretched between the 1970s and the 1980s. While many believe that famines are caused by such natural events as droughts or infestation, Keneally proves that its causes are often political. In all three cases, the author finds that a food shortage was caused by nature, but a full-scale famine developed owing to poor government planning and inaction. British response to the potato famine consisted of inadequate food donations and the insistence that the market would correct itself. In Bengal, the British failed to respond because of their defense of the Japanese invasion of Burma. Keneally additionally notes that the famine in Ethiopia that started under the dictator Haile Selassie was worsened by the Communist dictatorship that replaced him.
For the most part, critics responded positively to Three Famines. New York Times Book Review correspondent Johann Hari warned that “at times, the horrors reported in Three Famines can be numbing, though Keneally almost always gives us a God’s-eye view of the famines, rather than zooming in to provide us with the individual stories of the victims. It’s odd that he actually witnessed the Ethiopian famine of the late ’80s, but chooses not to provide any sense of what it looked or sounded or smelled like. It’s an unpleasant irony to say of a book about famine that it leaves you hungry for more, but this one does.” Nevertheless, Hari concluded: “In its human glimpses, we see why Keneally’s message is so important. … As yet more glib headlines announce that East Africa is currently suffering a biblical failure of crops, rather than a failure of accountable government, this book—and her cries—could hardly be more urgent.” Seconding this opinion in his Maclean’s article, Brian Bethune dubbed the book an “eye-opening exercise in comparative history.” Freeman, writing again in Booklist, was also impressed, stating that Three Famines is “an important, unsettling, thought-provoking work.” As a Kirkus Reviews critic pointed out: “The author provides ample documentation instead of just preaching, but his important message is clear—unless we deal with the real causes of famine, it ‘has not had its last ride.’”
In 2014 Keneally published the third volume in his Australians set, subtitled Flappers to Vietnam. The account continues the history of Australia and its people and even includes personal recollections by Keneally himself. Reviewing the book in the Sydney Morning Herald, Michael McGirr opined that “this book needs a summer to absorb. It makes no grand or overarching statement about the tides of history. Yet its rich sense of humanity has a great deal to teach us and the generations that have inherited this story have much to learn from quietly sitting with it.” McGirr pointed out that “Keneally is patriotic. He is tolerant of Thomas Blamey but merciless towards Douglas MacArthur. He could never be accused of neglecting the Irish strain in Australian history but is curiously reticent about sectarianism. The Queen’s visit in 1954 doesn’t rate a mention.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th edition, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2000.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 27, 1984, pp. 231-234, Volume 43, 1987, pp. 229-237, Volume 117, 1999, pp. 207-252.
Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.
Encyclopedia of World Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Pierce, Peter, Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction, University of Queensland Press (Queensland, Australia), 1995.
Pierce, Peter, editor, Thomas Keneally: A Celebration, National Library of Australia (Parkes, ACT), 2006.
Quartermaine, Peter, Thomas Keneally, Edward Arnold (London, England), 1992.
PERIODICALS
Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), March 16, 2007, James Ley, review of The Widow and Her Hero.
America’s Intelligence Wire, April 6, 2004, “Australia’s Immigration Minister Hits out at Author for Criticizing Refugee Policy.”
Antipodes, December 1, 2008, Eve Newman, review of The Widow and Her Hero, p. 170.
Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, December 2, 2004, “Aussie Writers Stage Hunger Strike for Detainee.”
Australian (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), February 5, 2001, Maggie Ball, “Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Tom Keneally’s Bettany’s Book”; March 24, 2007, Barry Oakley, review of The Widow and Her Hero.
Booklist, November 1, 2002, Brad Hooper, review of Office of Innocence, p. 452; May 15, 2004, Brad Hooper, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 1579; October 1, 2006, Gilbert Taylor, review of A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia, p. 22; September 15, 2008, Jay Freeman, review of Searching for Schindler: A Memoir, p. 14; September 15, 2010, Jay Freeman, review of Australians, Volume 1: Origins to Eureka, p. 19; July 1, 2011, Jay Freeman, review of Three Famines: Starvation and Politics, p. 17; April 15, 2013, Brad Hooper, review of The Daughters of Mars, p. 30; January 1, 2015, Margaret Flanagan, review of Shame and the Captives, p. 54; August 1, 2016, Margaret Flanagan, review of Napoleon’s Last Island, p. 40; September 1, 2017, Bridget Thoreson, review of Crimes of the Father, p. 44.
Bookseller, March 28, 2008, “Keneally Revisits the Ark,” p. 13.
Detroit News, September 28, 1980, Robert Ostermann, review of Confederates; May 21, 1995, Barbara Holiday, review of A River Town, p. 8J.
Economist, July 15, 2006, review of A Commonwealth of Thieves, p. 83.
Entertainment Weekly, June 4, 2004, John Freeman, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 87.
Financial Times, March 17, 2007, Rose Jacobs, “Fiction—Shades of Grey: Thomas Keneally Returns to Wartime to Ask Questions about the Selfishness of the Brave,” p. 31; May 31, 2019, William Skidelsky, review of The Book of Science and Antiquities.
First Things, August 1, 2003, review of Office of Innocence, p. 59.
Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Virginia), November 9, 2008, “Put This One on Your ‘List,’” review of Searching for Schindler.
FWN Select, December 2, 2004, “DJ Schindler’s Ark Author Slams Australian Detention Camps.”
Guardian (London, England), November 15, 2008, Nicholas Wroe, “Thomas Keneally: Schindler’s Archivist”; November 9, 2012, Jay Parini, review of The Daughters of Mars; May 3, 2014, Alfred Hickling, review of Shame and the Captives; June 7, 2019, Beejay Silcox, review of The Book of Science and Antiquities.
Herald Scotland, May 25, 2019, Hugh MacDonald, review of The Book of Science and Antiquities.
Hindu, February 13, 2007, Parul Sharma, author profile.
Independent (London, England), March 16, 2006, Kathy Marks, “Thomas Keneally: Lust for Life and Death,” interview with author; November 3, 2008, Julia Pascal, review of Searching for Schindler; November 11, 2012, James Urquhart, review of The Daughters of Mars.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1971, review of A Dutiful Daughter, p. 465; July 1, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 35; February 1, 1976, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 150; November 1, 2002, review of Abraham Lincoln, p. 1591; December 15, 2002, review of Office of Innocence, p. 1791; April 15, 2004, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 350; July 1, 2006, review of A Commonwealth of Thieves, p. 664; August 15, 2008, review of Searching for Schindler; March 15, 2013, review of The Daughters of Mars; December 15, 2014, review of Shame and the Captives; August 15, 2017, review of Crimes of the Father; September 15, 2019, review of The Book of Science and Antiques.
Library Journal, February 15, 1995, Francine Fialkoff, review of A River Town, p. 182; December, 2002, Ann H. Fisher, review of Office of Innocence, p. 179; August, 2004, Robert E. Brown, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 68; September 1, 2006, Robert Moore, review of A Commonwealth of Thieves, p. 160; July 1, 2011, review of Three Famines; June 15, 2013, Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, review of The Daughters of Mars, p. 82; February 15, 2015, Edward B. Cone, review of Shame and the Captives, p. 88; October 15, 2016, James Coan, review of Napoleon’s Last Island, p. 73.
London Review of Books, November 7, 1985, John Sutherland, review of A Family Madness, pp. 24-26.
Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2008, Michael Harris, review of Searching for Schindler.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 15, 1989, Andrew Jaffe, review of To Asmara: A Novel of Africa, pp. 2, 13; May 16, 1993, Donna Rifkind, review of Woman of the Inner Sea, p. 7.
Maclean’s, September 12, 2011, Brian Bethune, review of Three Famines, p. 76.
Metro (London, England), October 14, 2008, Claire Allfree, “Searching for Schindler Fails to Fascinate.”
Nation, November 6, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 443.
National Review, November 29, 2004, John R. Coyne, Jr., review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 60.
New Statesman, September 1, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 295; October 26, 1973, review of Bring Larks and Heroes, p. 618; October 11, 1974, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans, p. 321; September 19, 1975, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 342; January 19, 1979, Blake Morrison, review of Passenger, p. 88; November 2, 1979, Michael Ratcliffe, review of Confederates, p. 682; March 1, 2004, Hugo Barnacle, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 54; November 13, 2000, Justine Ettler, “Novel of the Week,” p. 57; October 12, 2009, Lesley Chamberlain, review of The People’s Train, p. 47.
New Yorker, February 10, 1975, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose, p. 115; May 23, 1977, review of Season in Purgatory, p. 132; May 8, 1978, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. 156; May 19, 1986, Susan Lardner, review of A Family Madness, pp. 118-119.
New York Times, April 4, 1970, review of The Survivor, p. 27; October 18, 1982, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Schindler’s List, p. 19; May 26, 1985, Mel Gussow, “Stage: ‘Bullie House,’ Australian Metaphysics.”
New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1970, review of The Survivor, p. 48; September 12, 1971, review of A Dutiful Daughter, p. 53; August 27, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 3; December 3, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 74; February 9, 1975, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose, p. 7; April 11, 1976, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 7; February 27, 1977, review of Season in Purgatory, p. 30; March 26, 1978, Anne Tyler, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. G3; July 8, 1979, Daphne Merkin, review of Passenger, p. 13; October 5, 1980, Jeffrey Burke, review of Confederates, p. 3; March 16, 1986, Robert Towers, review of A Family Madness, p. 9; September 20, 1987, James Atlas, review of The Playmaker, pp. 7, 9; October 30, 1988, Samuel Hynes, review of Firestorm; October 1, 1989, Robert Stone, review of To Asmara, pp. 1, 42; April 7, 1991, Edward Hower, review of Flying Hero Class, p. 9; April 19, 1992, Katharine Weber, review of Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish, p. 12; April 26, 1992, Robert Houston, review of The Place Where Souls Are Born: A Journey into the Southwest, p. 22; April 18, 1993, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, review of Woman of the Inner Sea, p. 9; May 14, 1995, David Willis McCullough, review of A River Town, p. 12; April 14, 2002, Kevin Baker, review of American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles, p. 11; January 19, 2003, David Walton, review of Abraham Lincoln, p. 21; July 18, 2004, Terrence Rafferty, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 11; October 1, 2006, Alison McCulloch, review of A Commonwealth of Thieves, p. 8; September 18, 2011, Johann Hari, review of Three Famines, p. 9L; April 17, 2015, Gary Krist, review of Shame and the Captives, p. 19.
New Zealand Listener, November 17, 2007, Elspeth Sandys, review of Searching for Schindler.
Observer, April 25, 1971, review of A Dutiful Daughter, p. 32; November 24, 1974, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose, p. 34; September 21, 1975, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 23; December 14, 1975, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 19; September 4, 1977, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. 24; January 21, 1979, review of Passenger, p. 35; October 21, 1979, review of Confederates, p. 39; September 29, 1985, Blake Morrison, review of A Family Madness, p. 23; September 6, 1987, review of The Playmaker, p. 25; March 10, 1991, review of Flying Hero Class, p. 60; July 19, 1992, reviews of Woman of the Inner Sea and The Place Where Souls Are Born, p. 58; September 12, 1993, Peter Conrad, review of Memoirs from a Young Republic, p. 53.
Publishers Weekly, January 6, 1992, review of The Place Where Souls Are Born, p. 60; January 30, 1995, review of A River Town, p. 84; December 23, 2002, review of Office of Innocence, p. 43; May 24, 2004, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 42; August 7, 2006, review of A Commonwealth of Thieves, p. 43; August 28, 2006, Edward Nawotka, “PW Talks with Thomas Keneally,” p. 40; July 1, 2013, review of The Daughters of Mars, p. 64; August 1, 2016, review of Napoleon’s Last Island, p. 43; August 14, 2017, review of Crimes of the Father, p. 45; July 22, 2019, review of The Book of Science and Antiques, p. 177.
Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), October 19, 2008, Doug Childers, “Schindler’s List Author Takes Us from Pitch to Book to Film.”
Spectator, November 25, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 844; September 7, 1974, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose, p. 310; November 15, 1975, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 19; September 3, 1977, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. 24; December 14, 2002, Digby Durrant, review of Office of Innocence, p. 75; Charlotte Moore, March 24, 2007, “Wisdom through Waiting,” review of The Widow and Her Hero; October 18, 2008, Anne Applebaum, review of Searching for Schindler, p. 36; April 26, 2014, Caroline Moore, review of Shame and the Captives, p. 47; June 10, 2017, review of Crimes of the Father, p. 35.
Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, TX), May 6, 2003, Geoff Campbell, review of Office of Innocence.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), March 6, 2015, Pamela Miller, review of Shame and the Captives.
Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), October 12, 2002, Andrew Riemer, review of An Angel in Australia; September 22, 2003, Joyce Morga, “Australia’s Great Shame and the Triumph of the Literary World,” includes interview with author; October 1, 2007, Andrew Riemer, review of Searching for Schindler; March 16, 2007, Andrew Riemer, review of The Widow and Her Hero; January 3, 2015, Michael McGirr, review of Australians, Volume 3: Flappers to Vietnam.
Telegraph (London, England), April 12, 2007, Ed Lake, review of The Widow and Her Hero.
Time, October 26, 1987, review of The Playmaker, p. 123; May 15, 1995, Melvin Maddocks, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose, p. 80; June 14, 2004, Richard Lacayo, review of The Tyrant’s Novel, p. 83.
Times (London, England), October 10, 2008, Elaine Feinstein, review of Searching for Schindler; October 12, 2008, Ed King, “At a Glance,” review of Searching for Schindler.
Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 1970, review of The Survivor, p. 499; April 23, 1971, review of A Dutiful Daughter, p. 465; September 15, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 1041; October 26, 1973, review of Bring Larks and Heroes, p. 1299; October 11, 1974, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose, p. 513; September 19, 1975, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 1041; October 14, 1977, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. 1185; November 23, 1979, John Higgins, reviews of Confederates and Passenger; October 18, 1985, Michael Wood, review of A Family Madness, p. 1169; May 24, 2002, Benjamin Markovits, review of American Scoundrel: Love, War and Politics in Civil War America; September 25, 2009, Catriona Kelly, review of The People’s Train, p. 25; March 11, 2011, Frank Bongiorno, review of Australians, Volume 1: Origins to Eureka, p. 27.
Tulsa World (Tulsa, OK), December 9, 2007, “Conflict Inspires Author: He Says He Bases His Novels on History and Cultural Clashes.”
USA Today, October 16, 2008, Don Oldenburg, “‘Schindler’: The Tale’s in the Telling,” p. 7.
US Newswire, April 23, 2003, “Acclaimed Author Thomas Keneally to Be Honored at Benefit to Support Eritrean Drought Relief,” p. 1008112.
Washington Post Book World, April 27, 1969, Richard Sullivan, review of Three Cheers for the Paraclete, p. 18; April 19, 1970, review of The Survivor, p. 6; August 29, 1971, review of A Dutiful Daughter, p. 2; August 13, 1972, review of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, p. 5; January 26, 1975, Bruce Cook, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose, p. 3; March 26, 1978, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. G3; August 31, 1980, review of Confederates, p. 5; October 20, 1982, Jonathan Yardley, review of Schindler’s List, p. B1; March 24, 1991, Richard Lipez, review of Flying Hero Class, p. 8.
West Coast Review of Books, July 1, 1978, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. 38.
World Literature Today, December 22, 1977, review of Gossip from the Forest, p. 157; September 22, 1978, review of A Victim of the Aurora, p. 690; March 22, 1980, review of Passenger, p. 332; September 22, 1996, John Scheckter, review of A River Town, p. 1025; December 22, 2002, John Scheckter, review of Bettany’s Book, p. 129.
ONLINE
Aussie Reviews, http://www.aussiereviews.com/ (April 23, 2009), Magdalena Ball, review of An Angel in Australia.
Australian Book Review, http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/ (April 23, 2009), Peter Pierce, review of The Widow and Her Hero.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, http://www.abc.net.au/ (April 30, 2005), “Keneally Predicts Change in Immigration Policy”; (March 18, 2007) “Thomas Keneally’s The Widow and Her Hero,” interview with author.
Australian Literature @ Suite101.com, http://australian-literature.suite101.com/ (April 3, 2008), Susan Whelan, review of The Widow and Her Hero.
History Essays, http://www.ncs.net.au/history/ (April 23, 2009), Bradley Kenneth Webb, review of Our Republic.
National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/ (August 20, 2013), Jean Zimmerman, review of The Daughters of Mars.
Perry Middlemiss’s, http://www.middlemiss.org/ (April 23, 2009), biography of author.
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (September 13, 1999), Mary Elizabeth Williams, review of The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World.
OTHER
God or Politics: Tom Keneally in Eritrea (video), Don Featherstone Productions, 1990.
Thomas Michael "Mick" Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction. He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Eva Rinaldi [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Thomas Keneally
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Thomas Keneally
AO
Keneally at the premiere of the film Brave at the Sydney Film Festival on 11 June 2012
Born
Thomas Michael Keneally
7 October 1935 (age 83)
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation
Novelist
Nationality
Australian
Genre
Novels
Notable awards
Booker Prize
Spouse
Judy Martin (m. 1965)
Children
2
Thomas Keneally's voice
Menu
0:00
Recorded December 2007 from the BBC Radio 4 programme Bookclub
Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is a prolific[1] Australian novelist, playwright, and essayist. He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Contents
1
Early life
2
Career
3
Personal life
4
Schindler's Ark
5
Honours
6
Bibliography
6.1
Novels
6.2
The Monsarrat series, co-authored with Meg Keneally
6.3
Non-fiction
6.4
Drama
7
Notes
8
References
9
Further reading
10
External links
Early life[edit]
Both Keneally's parents (Edmund Thomas Keneally and Elsie Margaret Coyle) were born to Irish fathers in the timber and dairy town of Kempsey, New South Wales, and, though born in Sydney, his early years were also spent there.[2] By 1942, the family had moved to 7 Loftus Crescent, Homebush, a working-class suburb in the west of Sydney and Keneally was enrolled at Christian Brothers St Patrick's College, Strathfield. Shortly after, his brother John was born. Keneally studied Honours English for his Leaving Certificate in 1952, under Brother James Athanasius McGlade, and won a Commonwealth scholarship.[3]
Keneally then entered St Patrick's Seminary, Manly, to train as a Catholic priest. Although he was ordained as a deacon while at the seminary, after six years there he left in a state of depression and without being ordained to the priesthood. He worked as a Sydney schoolteacher before his success as a novelist and was a lecturer at the University of New England (1968–70).[3]
His father, Edmund Thomas Keneally, flew for the RAAF in World War II, then returned to work in a small business in Sydney.
Keneally was known as "Mick" until 1964 but began using the name Thomas when he started publishing, after advice from his publisher to use what was really his first name.[2]
Career[edit]
Kenneally's first story was published in the Bulletin magazine in 1962 under the pseudonym Bernard Coyle.[3] By February 2014, he had written over 50 books, including 30 novels.[4] He is particularly famed for his Schindler's Ark (1982) (later republished as Schindler's List), the first novel by an Australian to win the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler's List. He had already been shortlisted for the Booker three times prior to that: 1972 for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1975 for Gossip from the Forest, and 1979 for Confederates.[5]
Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.
Keneally has also acted in a handful of films. He had a small role in Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) (based on his own novel) and played Father Marshall in the award-winning film The Devil's Playground (1976), also by Schepisi.[6]
In 1983, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).[7] He is an Australian Living Treasure.
Keneally was a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council from 1985 to 1988 and President of the National Book Council from 1985 to 1989.[3]
Keneally was a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) where he taught the graduate fiction workshop for one quarter in 1985. From 1991 to 1995, he was a visiting professor in the writing program at UCI.[8]
In 2006, Peter Pierce, Professor of Australian Literature, James Cook University, wrote:[3]
Keneally can sometimes seem the nearest that we have to a Balzac of our literature; he is in his own rich and idiosyncratic ways the author of an Australian 'human comedy'.
The Tom Keneally Centre opened in August 2011 at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, housing Keneally's books and memorabilia. The site is used for book launches, readings and writing classes.[9]
Personal life[edit]
Keneally married Judy Martin, then a nurse, in 1965, and they had two daughters, Margaret and Janet.[10][3]
Keneally was the founding chairman (1991–93) of the Australian Republic Movement[5] and published a book on the subject Our Republic in 1993. Several of his Republican essays appear on the website of the movement. He is also a keen supporter of rugby league football,[11] in particular the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles club of the NRL. In 2004, he gave the sixth annual Tom Brock Lecture.[12] He made an appearance in the 2007 rugby league drama film The Final Winter.[13]
In March 2009, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, gave an autographed copy of Keneally's biography Lincoln to President Barack Obama as a state gift.[14]
Keneally's nephew Ben is married to former Premier of New South Wales and Sky News Australia newscaster now Senator Kristina Keneally.[15]
Schindler's Ark[edit]
Main article: Schindler's Ark
Keneally wrote the Booker Prize-winning novel in 1982, inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. In 1980, Keneally met Pfefferberg in the latter's shop, and learning that he was a novelist, Pfefferburg showed him his extensive files on Oskar Schindler, including the original list itself.[16] Keneally was interested, and Pfefferberg became an advisor for the book, accompanying Keneally to Poland where they visited Kraków and the sites associated with the Schindler story. Keneally dedicated Schindler's Ark to Pfefferberg: "who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written." He said in an interview in 2007 that what attracted him to Oskar Schindler was that "it was the fact that you couldn't say where opportunism ended and altruism began. And I like the subversive fact that the spirit breatheth where it will. That is, that good will emerge from the most unlikely places".[2] The book was later made into a film titled Schindler's List (1993) directed by Steven Spielberg, earning the director his first Best Director Oscar. Keneally's meeting with Pfefferberg and their research tours are detailed in Searching for Schindler: A Memoir (2007). Some of the Pfefferberg documents that inspired Keneally are now housed in the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.[17] In 1996 the State Library purchased this material from a private collector.[18]
Honours[edit]
Keneally has been awarded honorary doctorates including one from the National University of Ireland.[5]
Awards
Man Booker Prize
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, shortlisted 1972
Gossip from the Forest, shortlisted 1975
Confederates, shortlisted 1979
Schindler's Ark, winner 1982
Miles Franklin Award
Bring Larks and Heroes, winner 1967
Three Cheers for the Paraclete, winner 1968
An Angel in Australia, shortlisted 2003
The Widow and Her Hero, longlisted 2008
Prime Minister's Literary Awards
The Widow and Her Hero, shortlisted 2008
New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
Special Award, winner 2008
Helmerich Award
Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, 2007
Bibliography[edit]
Novels[edit]
The Place at Whitton (1964)
The Fear (1965), rewritten in (1989) as By the Line
Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), winner of the Miles Franklin Award, set in an unidentified British penal colony
Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), winner of the Miles Franklin Award, comic novel of a doubting priest
The Survivor (1969), a survivor looks back on a disastrous Antarctic expedition
A Dutiful Daughter (1971), Keneally's personal favourite
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), also filmed. Written through the eyes of an exploited Aborigine who explodes in rage. Based on an actual incident. Keneally has said he would not now presume to write in the voice of an Aborigine, but would have written the story as seen by a white character.
Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974), a novel based loosely on the life of Joan of Arc
Moses the Lawgiver (1975)
Gossip from the Forest (1975), tells of the negotiation of the armistice that ended World War I
Season in Purgatory (1976), love among Tito's partisans in World War II
Ned Kelly and the City of the Bees (1978), a book for children
A Victim of the Aurora (1978), a detective story set on an Antarctic expedition
Passenger (1979)
Confederates (1979), based on Stonewall Jackson's army
The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980), Australia at war in 1942
Schindler's Ark (1982), winner of the Booker Prize, later released and filmed as Schindler's List
A Family Madness (1985)
The Playmaker (1987), prisoners perform a play in Australia in the 18th Century
Act of Grace (1985), (under the pseudonym William Coyle) Published as Firestorm in the US
By the Line (1989), working-class families face World War II in Sydney
Towards Asmara (1989), the conflict in Eritrea
Flying Hero Class (1991), Palestinians hijack an aeroplane carrying an Aboriginal folk dance troupe
Chief of Staff (1991), (under the pseudonym William Coyle)
Woman of the Inner Sea (1993), Keneally retells a story once told him by a young woman that haunted his imagination
Jacko: The Great Intruder (1993), madness and television
A River Town (1995)
Bettany's Book (2000)
An Angel in Australia (2000), also published as Office of Innocence
The Tyrant's Novel (2003), an Australian immigration detainee tells his story
The Widow and Her Hero (2007), the effect of war on those left behind
The People's Train (2009), a dissident escapes from Russia to Australia in 1911, only to return to fight in the revolution
The Daughters of Mars (2012), two Australian sisters struggle to nurse soldiers horrifically wounded in World War I
Shame and the Captives (2014), ISBN 147673464X, recounts the escape of Japanese prisoners of war in New South Wales during WWII
Napoleon's Last Island (2015)
Crimes of the Father (2016)
Two Old Men Dying (2018)
The Monsarrat series, co-authored with Meg Keneally[edit]
The Soldier’s Curse (2016)
The Unmourned (2017)
The Power Game (2018)
The Ink Stain (2019)
Non-fiction[edit]
Outback (1983)
Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime (1987)
The Place Where Souls are Born: A Journey to the Southwest (1992)
Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish (1992)
Memoirs from a Young Republic (1993)
The Utility Player: The Des Hasler Story (1993) Rugby league footballer Des Hasler
Our Republic (1995)
Homebush Boy: A Memoir (1995), autobiography
The Great Shame (1998)
American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (2002), biography of Daniel Sickles
Lincoln (2003), biography of Abraham Lincoln
The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the Founding of Australia (2005)
Searching for Schindler: A Memoir (2007)
Australians: Origins to Eureka (2009)
Three Famines: Starvation and Politics (2011)
Australians: Eureka to the Diggers (2011)
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam (2014)
Australians: A Short History (2016)
Drama[edit]
Halloran's Little Boat (1968)
Childermas (1968)
An Awful Rose (1972)
Bullie's House (1981)
Either Or (2007)[19]
Keneally, Thomas THE BOOK OF SCIENCE AND ANTIQUITIES Atria (Adult Fiction) $28.00 12, 10 ISBN: 978-1-9821-2103-7
A filmmaker and a prehistoric predecessor muse on humanity and mortality.
Booker Prize-winning novelist Keneally (Crimes of the Father, 2017, etc.) tells the parallel tales of aging filmmaker Shelby Apple and Learned Man, an Australian mystic of 42,000 years ago. Both men confront serious problems. Apple has cancer, and Learned Man must interpret and enforce the sometimes-deadly justice of the gods. Keneally offers a few vivid scenes, such as the Vietnam battle that catapulted Apple to cinematic fame. Such moments are outweighed by the sometimes head-scratching interludes in which Learned Man describes his people's ways: "My first boy, not my Son Unnameable, was killed by a curse that overtook his mouth when he was still young and swelled his head to a dreadful size. Afterwards, our clan marched forth with spears to face the Parrot clan, and we contested them on the ground of war until a necessary measure of blood had been shed." Big topics are addressed: manhood, love, war, humanity's past and future, the meaning of life, the nature of death. (The book was released in Australia as Two Old Men Dying.) But Apple isn't engaging in his ponderings, and Learned Man's world befuddles as often as it intrigues. The women in both eras are strong but mostly serve as objects of men's affection or lust--and those prehistoric sex scenes should maybe have been taken out back and buried. ("After she had healed my plant, demanding now and then that I not succumb yet and give her my sap too early, she eased herself backwards onto the fur and that great passage of hers was mine to go into. How we toiled.")
Dedicated readers might excavate nuggets of wisdom, but most will wonder if the expedition was worth it.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Keneally, Thomas: THE BOOK OF SCIENCE AND ANTIQUITIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964560/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=96b2fb82. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964560
The Book of Science and Antiquities
Thomas Keneally. Atria, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-1-982-12103-7
The inventive but disappointing 33rd novel from Keneally (Schindler's Ark) centers on the improbable but resonant parallels between an Australian documentary filmmaker and Learned Man, a 42,000-year-old predecessor of the Australian aborigines. After a prolific career, Shelby Apple is in his late 70s when he's diagnosed with esophageal cancer, causing him to reflect on his life. His first documentary was on aboriginal eye disease and, after winning an Academy Award for a film on the Vietnam War, he began working with Peter Jorgenson, a geomorphologist who first discovered the skeleton of Learned Man. As Apple ponders his legacy, he decides to renew an old petition to the Australian government to have Learned Man returned to his original resting place from museum storage. Apple's remembrances transport him to prehistoric Australia, and the narrative becomes interspersed with Learned Man's own exchanges as a clan elder. Learned Man mourns the loss of his son, cherishes his wife, and struggles to understand and perform his duties as a judge and punisher. While the intriguing premise allows Keneally to delve into themes of leaving a legacy and man's place within nature, unfortunately, both characters remain underdeveloped and Learned Man's narrative is delivered in dry prose. This won't go down as one of Keneally's better works. (Dec.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Book of Science and Antiquities." Publishers Weekly, 22 July 2019, p. 177. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A595252176/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e194408. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A595252176
Crimes of the Father. By Thomas Keneaily. Oct. 2017. 352p. Atria, $26 (9781501128486).
Father Frank Docherty is no stranger to controversy. As a young Australian priest, he was banished to Canada because of his political views on apartheid and Vietnam. But when he returns to visit Australia in the late 1990s, he finds his research into how the Catholic Church has handled cases of sexual abuse leading him to the victims of a priest he knows, and into a dispute that gets to the very heart of morality and faith. The celebrated author of novels including Schindler's List (1982) and The Daughters of Mars (2013) has crafted a nuanced exploration of the people--victims, clergy, and laity--at the heart of the scandal that has rocked the church and its followers. Keneaily, who as a young man had studied for the priesthood, ventures deep into ecclesiastical territory, such as the 1968 letter from the pope on birth control, while building a comprehensive portrait of the different experiences his various characters have had with the church. The result is stunning and heartrending, a work of fiction that has the terrible ring of truth.--Bridget Thoreson
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "Crimes of the Father." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A509161553/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b0d5c85. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161553
Keneally, Thomas CRIMES OF THE FATHER Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 10, 31 ISBN: 978-1-5011-2848-6
The sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests in Australia gets a sensitive but uneven treatment by the author of Schindler's List.From the moment Father Frank Docherty returns to Australia in 1996 after a long absence, he is embroiled in controversy. The woman driving his cab angrily refuses money when she learns he is a cleric. Docherty, a psychologist studying abusive priests, thinks she is part of the "enlarging rage now loose in the world" as cases have begun to emerge publicly. He finds out that she is a former victim and an ex-nun. When a suicide note in another case names a local monsignor, Docherty must confront the priest's sister, with whom he nearly strayed from his vow of celibacy when he was younger. Australian writer Keneally (Napoleon's Last Stand, 2016 etc.) portrays the older Docherty as a man who favors caution over outrage. Even as he advises families struck by abuse, he's also trying to resume priestly work in Australia after having been banished in the 1960s for his political beliefs and doesn't want to ruffle his cardinal's feathers. Weaving through the novel is the ongoing case of a victim who refuses the church's current cash settlement and its demand of silence, thus bringing the issue to court and the press. The scenes with the church panel seeking settlement--which includes the predatory monsignor--point up the oily eloquence and spiritual clout brought to bear against any further undermining of an edifice already weakened by skepticism and secularism. Most painful are passages in which victims are wooed in the confessional box, a particularly cynical manipulation of youthful guilt and an awful perversion of the Catholic sacrament. Keneally's earnest effort to encompass the many legal and religious facets of this issue unfortunately results in more of an agenda than a novel.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Keneally, Thomas: CRIMES OF THE FATHER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A500364997/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dd5b3e80. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364997
Crimes of the Father
Thomas Keneally. Atria, $26 (352p) ISBN 9781-5011-2848-6
The scandal involving the sexual abuse of children by the clergy of the Catholic Church in Australia fuels this well-intentioned if oddly passive novel by the author of Schindler's List. Set in 1996, the story follows likeable and intelligent Father Frank Docherty, exiled to Canada decades earlier for his liberal political views, who returns briefly to Sydney to see his aging mother and deliver a speech on the relationship between celibacy and child abuse. Coincidentally, the woman who drives his cab from the airport was abused as a girl by "smarmy" Monsignor Leo Shannon (the brother of a woman, Maureen, with whom Docherty was once tempted to break his vows of chastity). So was another young man who recently committed suicide, Docherty discovers. The novel moves awkwardly among scenes from Docherty's earlier life, a case history of the cab driver, the memories of Maureen, and the present building of a case against Monsignor Shannon. While the subject matter is timely and relevant, and Keneally makes a clear distinction between the virtues of the "misrepresented and abused" Jesus and the "apparatchiks of the Church," the novel comes across as closer to essay than effective narrative. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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"Crimes of the Father." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 45+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A501717078/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d0d7d48b. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717078
Crimes of the Father
by Thomas Keneally
Sceptre, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 382
This may seem an odd thing to say about a writer who's been officially declared a National Living Treasure in his native Australia, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before winning it with Schindler's Ark--but I sometimes think Thomas Keneally is badly underrated. After all, Schindler's Ark won that Booker Prize 35 years--and 19 Keneally novels--ago, and since then his reputation appears to have settled down into that of a solid craftsman: the sort of novelist who rarely lets you down, but who never quite hits the literary heights either.
As to how this wildly unjust verdict has come about, my own theories would include the traditional suspicion of prolifigacy (in those 35 years, Keneally has also written 18 non-fiction books); and maybe even that his unfailing good-bloke geniality doesn't fit our preferred image of a Great Author. One thing that certainly can't be the reason, though, is the quality of Keneally's work.
Of course, as he genially admits, over a 53-year career, some of his books have been better than others. Now and again, his tendency to wear his considerable heart on his sleeve can lead to sentimentality --as in 1989's Towards Asmara, about the Eritrean fight for independence. Yet at his best--2012's towering first world war novel Daughters of Mars, for example--he's pretty much matchless: his humanism combined with clear-eyed analysis, exhilarating story-telling and prose of unforced grandeur.
On that spectrum, Crimes of the Father falls somewhere in the middle--which is to say that it's merely very good indeed. The subject is one that, amid all his literary globe-trotting and time-travelling, Keneally has regularly returned to: the Australian Catholic church (itself a result of another of his abiding themes--the sheer weirdness of Irish history being lived out 13,000 miles from Ireland). He himself trained as a priest, leaving just before ordination: partly through an increasing unease about the Church's sexual attitudes, and partly through a realisation that
behind the compelling mystery of Catholicism,
with its foundation in the message of
'Caritas Christi' [the love of Christ] ... lay
a cold and largely self-interested corporate
institution.
Nearly 60 years later neither of these things, it seems, has lost the power to shock him. The book is set in the mid-1990s when the accusations of clerical sexual abuse were becoming impossible to ignore--and when, as a heartfelt Author's Note says, 'the Church, faced with this crisis, reached not for the compassion of Christ but for the best lawyers available'. Yet, despite being only 'a cultural Catholic' these days, Keneally clearly still feels the sting of betrayal--not least because the ideals being betrayed, he firmly suggests, continue to be of value.
In fact, the novel's hero Fr Frank Docherty is an unmistakable embodiment of them. Docherty's faith may no longer be 'co-extensive' with his 'world view', as Keneally acutely puts it, but his commitment to Caritas Christi remains undiminished. Back in 1972, his opposition to the Vietnam war and the Church's ban on artificial contraception meant the Archbishop of Sydney had him exiled to Canada, where he's recently been studying the psychology of child abuse. Now, he's back in Sydney for three weeks to give a not entirely welcome lecture on his findings.
From there, the plot does require a few handy coincidences to get going. (In his self-deprecating way, Keneally has acknowledged that Schindler's Ark is his best-plotted novel--'and the humiliating thing is that the plot already existed'.) For a start, Docherty is picked up at the airport by a taxi-driver who herself suffered clerical abuse as a young teenager. It then turns out that the priest responsible is not only the brother of a woman that Docherty once loved, but is also leading the Church's attempts to keep the whole scandal under wraps.
Fortunately, all this is put in place without much fuss--and once it has been, the novel can get down to its real business of providing an exploration of Australian Catholicism that manages to be impressively thorough without seeming over-systematic --and that combines indignation and sorrow with a genuine attempt to understand (although not to excuse) the Church's actions. As ever, too, Keneally is extraordinarily generous in his storytelling, with all the main characters having richly-imagined pasts that are sometimes useful for illustrating the points he wants to make--but sometimes appear to be there just for the purposes of giving the reader even more to relish.
In the end, there's still no denying that this is fundamentally an issue-driven book. Nonetheless, the force and resonance of the issue in question--together with Keneally's wise and thoughtful treatment of it--make for another hugely satisfying read from one of the world's great writers.
Caption: 'Of course they're pink! I'm an albino!
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Walton, James. "The sting of betrayal." Spectator, 10 June 2017, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A498478588/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=19fab449. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498478588
Keneally, Thomas. Napoleon's Last Island. Atria. Oct. 2016.416p. ISBN 9781501128424. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781501128448. F
In 1815, Napoleon arrives on the remote island of St. Helena to begin his exile under British control. He moves in temporarily to an empty house on the grounds of another residence occupied by a British family, the Balcombes. Their strong-willed, independent-minded teenage daughter Betsy tells the tale of their relationship to the former emperor. Almost immediately, Betsy and her family come under the spell of this charismatic and sympathetic character, cast as a villain by the British establishment and most of Europe but charming, deferential, and witty in the flesh. Later, Napoleon is relocated to another residence on St. Helena, and a new, more severe British commander assumes control of the island. Betsy and her family's friendship and helpfulness toward the exile come to be viewed as treasonous by the new authorities. VERDICT Evidently based on true accounts, the novel as told by Betsy has accurately reproduced the diction of a 19th-century writer, which occasionally slows the pace of this engaging work by well-known Australian author Keneally (Confederates; Schindler's List). [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Coan, James. "Keneally, Thomas. Napoleon's Last Island." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 73. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A466412951/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bdfe78de. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466412951
Napoleon's Last Island. By Thomas Keneally. Oct. 2016. 416p. Atria, $30 (9781501128424).
Despite the title, Keneally's (Shame and the Captives, 2015) latest historical novel is an agonizing coming-of-age story, rather than a predictable chronicle of Napoleon's final years. Permanently exiled to the southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena ("the cursed rock") after his disastrous defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon befriends a young girl and her family. Awaiting the completion of his permanent quarters, the former emperor is billeted with the Balcombe family. Fascinated by their temporary houseguest, each family member is inexorably drawn into his exotic and dysfunctional orbit to varying degrees, none more so than young Betsy. Though lopsided in many ways, the quirky friendship that blossoms between the two is understandable, given the spiritual and geographic isolation of both Bonaparte and Betsy. Unfortunately, Napoleon exacts as heavy a price in his personal relationships as he did in his military campaigns, and the Balcombe family is permanently splintered in his emotional war of attrition. Loosely based on actual events and real-life historical figures, Keneally's retelling of Napoleon's Saint Helena years through the eyes of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood makes for a deeply intriguing, if somewhat fanciful, read.--Margaret Flanagan
YA: Betsy's teenage perspective will resonate with YA fans of historical fiction. SH.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Napoleon's Last Island." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A460761718/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9de5d662. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761718
Napoleon's Last Island
Thomas Keneally. Atria, $30 (416p) ISBN 978-1-5011-2842-4
Australian author Keneally (The Daughters of Mars) once again uses fiction to illuminate a little-known aspect of history. In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte is exiled to the English-governed island of St. Helena. His residence not yet ready, he and his retinue are taken in by William Balcombe, a representative of the East India Company, who has two daughters, Betsy and Jane. The Balcombes, as well as everyone else on the island, find Napoleon to be a charming houseguest, instead of the Great Ogre. But 13-year-old Betsy, smart and independent-minded, is not so easily won over, and her relationship with the former emperor is initially fractious. Eventually, though, their friendship becomes the talk of the island. Then, a new governor to St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, cracks down on Napoleon's life in exile, cutting his household budget and staff and confiscating Christmas gifts, and even the Balcombes are made to suffer. Ultimately, a shocking scene forces Betsy to reevaluate everything she thinks she knows about her parents, her neighbors, and her new friend. Narrated by Betsy, Keneally's book gives readers a persuasive account of this precocious teenager's view of the world's most infamous man. He makes Betsy an engaging and witty presence, and he charts her destiny into her post--St. Helena existence, where the short general's long shadow continues to affect her life. Like the late E.L. Doctorow, Keneally adapts his style to suit his subject matter, and here the high formality of 19th-century journal-keeping helps bring alive the bittersweet last days of Napoleon. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Napoleon's Last Island." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 43+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A460285656/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eda794d9. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285656
The Book of Science and Antiquities by Thomas Keneally review – Australia according to early man
Does a fictionalised 42,000-year-old tribal elder need a white contemporary spokesperson?
Beejay Silcox
Fri 31 May 2019 07.30 BST
Last modified on Fri 7 Jun 2019 13.32 BST
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A sign at the burial of ‘Mungo Man’ remains in 2017. Photograph: Dean Sewell/The Guardian
Thomas Keneally’s new novel, the Booker prize-winner’s 33rd, is about two old men dying. Its Australian title is Two Old Men Dying. It arrives on UK shelves as The Book of Science and Antiquities, a more studious and genial appellation, but decidedly less funny. The gain in poetic decorum comes at the expense of its distinctly Australian pith, that gloriously inscrutable cultural mix of no-bullshit literalness and bone-deep irony.
Is The Book of Science and Antiquities a sly existential joke, or an entirely solemn endeavour? It’s billed as the latter, as Keneally’s most candid work of fiction to date, a kind of grand human hymn. But there’s a wink or two that suggests he is chuckling into the cosmic void.
Shelby Apple is an octogenarian film-maker, newly diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. As a young man, unassailable and reckless, he won an Oscar for a Vietnam war documentary he filmed with his best friend, who died on the battlefield. The acclaim felt like permission: “a sort of licence to point my camera at the world for a lifetime”, Shelby explains. He has spent that lifetime “devour[ing] the world through a series of lenses”, from Eritrea to the Arctic. But his most potent preoccupation has been the story of a 42,000-year-old human skeleton, unearthed in Australia’s Lake Learned (a fictionalised Lake Mungo), archaeological evidence that Indigenous people inhabited the continent thousands of years earlier than white theorists first imagined.
Shelby is adamant that “Learned Man” could be “the reconciling phenomenon between Australia’s geological antiquity and its social juvenility”, if only he were properly celebrated, rather than languishing in a museum storeroom. As his cancer takes root, Shelby campaigns to return Learned Man to his burial site; but whose legacy is he preserving?
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The Book of Science and Antiquities alternates between Shelby’s mortality-fuelled reminiscences and the Pleistocene exploits of Shade, the tribal elder whose tenderly buried bones will inspire the film-maker’s devotion 40 millennia later. It’s an ambitiously haphazard counter-narrative that draws heavily on the rituals of pre-conquest Australia: kinship rules, avoiding naming the dead, feather-shod law men. It’s a world of sky gods and heroes, allegiances and vengeance, rendered with the straight-backed gravitas of a Homeric epic: “Each man, emerging from his mother, inherits the world as a gift and a burden, and I am of an age to judge the exact weight of the burden. So, as I am more mindful of joy than ever, I am also mindful of duties, and the shallow laughter has been replaced by a longer and abiding laughter that is in me, but also larger than me.”
Shade has dreamed of his tribe’s ruin, and a sacrifice will need to be made. Even this spirit-haunted realm of megafauna can’t seem to escape the gravitational pull of Judeo-Christian allegory.
Keneally acknowledges that it’s “a gross fraternal impoliteness for a white fellow to horn in on Aboriginal tales”, but begs forgiveness in light of the ancient, common humanity of his Palaeolithic inspiration. There’s a gossamer line between idealism and solipsism. Shelby struggles to see it. His creator is an accomplished tightrope walker, but falters in this novel. For all its expansive intentions, it’s a book whose delights are quiet; only Keneally, for instance, would describe a banksia flower as “a candle on the altar of the life machine”.
Mungo Man: the final journey of our 40,000-year-old ancestor
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In tethering Shade’s fate to Shelby’s, Keneally is attempting to create a Möbius strip, a human loop. “He prodded at the universe the way we prod at it,” he writes of our ancient forerunner. “He chased love with the same sacred and profane mix of motives we do.” But Shade’s humanity is self-evident; he does not need a “child of white Australia” to act as his contemporary spokesperson.
If anything, it is Shelby who needs Shade. For Keneally’s documentarian is his own kind of relic, a baby-boomer dinosaur, far too willing to mistake unfettered opportunity for luck. An unfaithfully uxorious husband, he views women as men’s better angels: “wise enough to transcend us; crass enough as an ill-advised majority to be charmed by us”.
Ernest Hemingway’s fish wrangler, John Updike’s Rabbit, John Williams’s Stoner: 20th-century literature is a diligent and exhaustive catalogue of male senescence raging against the dying of the light. It’s hard to get excited about another eulogy to virility. The Book of Science and Antiquities lacks JM Coetzee’s caustic cruelty, or Philip Roth’s grotesque libidinousness. Shelby isn’t delightfully awful, he’s just tiresomely ordinary. Perhaps this is the novel’s lurking punchline – that the mundane can be mythic, and the mythic, mundane. The joke would be funnier if the women in Keneally’s novel weren’t confined to roles of warm-bodied consolation (save the occasional “tigress” or “calyx of desire”). There is a Learned Woman, too, but her story remains – tellingly – untold.
• The Book of Science and Antiquities is published by Hodder (RRP £20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. .
Review: The Book of Science and Antiquities, by Thomas Keneally
By Hugh MacDonald
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The Book of Science and Antiquities
Thomas Keneally
Sceptre, £20
THIS novel could not carry more associations with death if it arrived from one’s favourite bookseller by horse-drawn carriage preceded by a gentleman in top hat and mourning clothes.
At 83, Thomas Keneally has survived a brush with death and seems content to embrace it rather than shun the inevitable. The Book of Antiquities is thus a book of philosophy, a novel that seeks significance in the most vital arena.
This is a story of how to die but also of how to live. If it reeks of death, it also bristles with what makes life worth living. The two, of course, need not be parallel stories but intertwined.
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Keneally takes this notion into the novel’s structure. It consists of alternate stories: one of Shade, whose bones are found 42,000 years after his death, and the other of Shelby, a modern Australian.
The style is deceptively facile. Keneally, curiously, remains an underrated writer. This may be because he is astonishingly prolific with more than 30 novels, more than a dozen non-fiction works and two children’s books to his name. It may owe something, too, to his commercial success. There persists misgivings in some sects of the literary world over writers who can make money from their craft. Yet Keneally has remained consistently engaging, provocative and original down the years. Schindler’s Ark (renamed Schindler’s List to chime with the film), Confederates and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith are simply outstanding novels and the octogenarian shows no signs that his powers are diminishing.
Indeed, he has added elements of the deeply personal to his fiction. His most recent, Crimes of the Father, investigated with compassion and intelligence the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church where once he was a seminarian.
The links in The Book of Science and Antiquities are more explicit. Shelby is an artist who tells stories through film rather than in word but he suffers from the oesophageal cancer that once struck Keneally. The fictional character’s brother is a doctor who dies from cancer, as did the brother of Keneally. Shelby is described as a large man and Keneally would never be mistaken for Wayne Sleep.
It is, perhaps, even more intriguing to link Keneally to his main characters’ thoughts of death and principles of living. The author once spoke of how his fear of death had left in old age, memorably stating that death was not the fly in the cosmic ointment but the cosmic ointment itself.
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This level of easy acceptance is normally the product of hard experience. "Being human is a test that kills us" is merely one of the sentiments expressed without rancour in a book of wonder and regular brilliance.
Keneally can stray uncomfortably close to the realms of Raquel Welch and One Million Years BC in his portrayal of the Learned Man whose bones were found in a dried-up lake in Australia. The ancient world can reek of cliché but he gradually shrugs this off to paint a convincing portrait of primitive man with advanced thought and feeling. Shade becomes a figure of substance rather than of caricature.
Shelby, of course, is more confidently assembled. It is not just the resemblances to the author that make him recognisable but his drives, sins and concerns in the modern world. He is a flawed man, prone to morbid introspection, susceptible to guilt but determined to be a force for good.
There is a laying down of innocence in both main characters. Shelby, for example, finds he has built his career on death, profiting from the death of his partner while filming a Vietnam documentary. He remarks: “I thought how stupid I had been to countenance death.” He maintains a principled stand to search for truth even if he finds betrayal, most spectacularly in himself.
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This summation may make the novel seem pompous or even dull. However, Keneally’s art is to make the profound accessible. The important is rendered seamlessly. The stories of Shade and Shelby run side by side and they are drawn together in concerns and in fate. The simple message is that there is a communality to the human experience that spans 42,000 years.
But there is also the fascinating investigation of how DNA can change and how humans can change in the most fundamental way. Was Shade the result of a sudden, great leap forward in the mind and spirit of man? Is Shelby a front-runner in the race of the species towards a deeper consciousness, one espoused by many leading theologians, including Richard Rohr? This theme is only lightly touched but it leaves its mark.
Keneally, too, is far too nuanced a writer to illuminate the darkness without also investigating it. Shelby travels to war zones regularly. He knows the capacity in mankind for sacrifice, goodness and love. He also experiences the species’ capability for what can only be described as evil. On an expedition to war-torn Eritrea, he looks at a wall that has been disfigured by bayonets.
“I looked at the chart [on the wall] and thought I knew nothing about humanity, that I was a mere visitor, and the sickness came over me and I went out into the garden and vomited.”
Thus Shelby looks at the horror, the horror and has to flinch, even momentarily. But he endures to face his ultimate test. In his view of death he comes to resemble not just the author but Shade, his forefather, who walked on the same Earth, felt the same emotions, faced the same fate 42,000 years earlier.
Gently, but with a commanding assurance, Keneally takes us to the end – or is it another beginning – of reshaped form or reformed atoms?
There can be no certainty. There is always pain. It infects, even disfigures the leading characters. But there is also the love that forgives and sustains. There is hope that endures, a reality that helping others is a spiritual necessity that owes nothing to a belief in deity but everything to fulfilling a distinct, even innate purpose.
Keneally invites the reader “to gaze calmly on the limitless sea of death”. In a book that teems with journeys and voyages, both spiritual and physical, he finds something true, brave and powerful to say about mankind’s fate. He has danced with death and produced something invigorating.
The Book of Science & Antiquities — an enjoyable step back in time
Thomas Keneally ingeniously captures the adventures of a tribesman’s life 42,000 years ago
© Gianni Dagli Orti/REX/Shutterstock
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William Skidelsky
May 31 2019
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Thomas Keneally is a formidably prolific writer. The Australian, now 83, has been at work for 55 years and has published roughly as many books: mainly novels, but also 18 works of non-fiction, plus a smattering of plays.His method is often akin to that of a documentary-maker: he goes out into the world and discovers interesting things (remarkable people, overlooked historical events), which he then recasts as fiction. Most famously, Keneally once got chatting to a shop owner in Beverly Hills, who proved to be a Holocaust survivor, and told him the story that would become the basis of his best-known work, the 1982 Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s Ark.Perhaps, then, there is an element of self-recognition (or self-satire) in the fact that Keneally’s latest novel is part-narrated by an ageing documentary-maker who fears that he has devoted his life to appropriating other people’s stories. In fact, it takes only a little digging to discover that Keneally and his creation, Shelby Apple, have a great deal in common. Both live in Sydney, both are married with two daughters, and both have had recent experiences of oesophageal cancer. (In 2017, Keneally wrote an article describing his treatment and recovery from the disease.)Shelby is also a voracious traveller, and much of the book — which sometimes has the feel of a late-life stock-taking exercise in novel form — consists of him recalling memorable trips to far-flung locations, always with a camera in hand: war-torn Vietnam (where he shot the Oscar-winning documentary that made his name); the Arctic Circle; Eritrea.But Shelby is only one of two protagonists — and the other, necessarily, is much less like his creator. Early on, Shelby tells us about “Learned Man”, a Palaeolithic human whose remains were discovered in the 1970s, and about whom he has made several films. Closely based (naturally) on a genuine archaeological discovery, Learned Man, we gather, was discovered by scientists to have lived about 42,000 years ago — a finding that massively pushed back the timeframe for when humans first arrived in Australia. (Previously, it was thought they had only lived there for some 20,000 years.)Shelby reveals that Learned Man has “stayed with me . . . longer than most things” — has become, in fact, a kind of obsession. “What must it have been to be human then,” he wonders, “when to be human was so marginal an experience, a world in which we were not yet the dominating force but had mere elbow room amongst a wealth of other species?”Through the novel’s second protagonist, Keneally has a stab at answering this question. Alternate chapters are narrated by Shade, a Palaeolithic tribesman who — it emerges — is none other than Learned Man.
It goes without saying that imagining human life more than 40,000 years ago is a formidable challenge, given how few traces (scattered bone fragments aside) remain from that time. What kind of human communities existed then? How far had language evolved?Rather ingeniously, Keneally sidesteps these difficulties by making Shade, in essence, a pre-invasion Aboriginal. Most elements of the society he belongs to are ones known to have recently existed among indigenous people. There is an account, for example, of a ritual execution involving shoes made of feathers and a murder weapon fashioned from a marsupial bone. Death and illness are always the result of curses, and Shade’s ancestors regularly appear to him in dreams. Yet to give Shade’s world a veneer of genuine ancientness, Keneally grafts in Pleistocene characteristics — among them brimming lakes, freezing nights, and strange, terrifying megafauna.The resulting novel is a mixed bag. There is a sense of too many elements — both narrative and thematic — being shoehorned in. Some of Shelby’s reminiscences feel irrelevant, as if Keneally has included them mainly to fill space, or because they mirror the author’s own experiences. An account of an episode aboard a ship, when Shelby tries to seduce a young film producer under the nose of his wife, certainly falls into this category.And yet these flaws are redeemed, to a large extent, by the sheer enjoyableness of the Shade chapters. His adventures — whether an account of a month spent alone in the wilderness, or of his son’s death at the hands of a “slicer” (a giant marsupial lion) — are consistently memorable, and it is well worth reading this novel for them alone.Has Keneally captured anything important about human life 42,000 years ago? Probably not. But he has clearly had fun trying, and so will readers of this book.The Book of Science & Antiquities, by Thomas Keneally, Sceptre, RRP£20, 312 pages