Keneally in new editions

Press, 23 March 1985, Page 22

Keneally in new editions

The Survivor. Penguin, 1984 (first ed., 1969). 282 pp. A Dutiful Daughter. Penguin, 1984 (first ed., 1971). 147 pp. Both by Thomas Keneally. (Reviewed by Ruth Zanker) Thomas Keneally has become well known since his “Schindler’s Ark” won the Booker Prize and Spielberg picked up the story for a movie. It is inevitable there should be a rush to reissue earlier fiction by this interesting and prolific Australian author, but it is a sad reflection on the juggernaut of marketing that novels so different in style and content should be pushed as preludes to his award winner. Readers expecting the bluff, roughhewn prose and story appeal of “Schindler’s Ark” will find they are entering murkier waters with these two earlier novels. Both are interesting for the way Keneally uses the novel form. These novels are set in

contemporary Australia. In “The Survivor” Alec Ramsey grapples with private guilt about what happened on an Antarctic expedition of his youth when the frozen remains of the expedition leader are located. Flashbacks to his youth contrast with the machinations amongst his mundane Australian university faculty. Damian, in “A Dutiful Daughter,” grapples with guilts, too, when he returns during university student vacation to his bizarre family on a godforsaken dairy farm. Among other things, he confronts his lust for his sister and the grotesque transformation of his parents. It is a matter of taste whether you find this novel overwrought in its imagery or powerfully tactile. In both novels Keneally seems interested in exploring the darker recesses in people who otherwise try to slot into twentiethcentury banality.