Past and present violence

Press, 7 December 1985, Page 20

Past and present violence

A Family Madness. By Thomas Keneally. Hodder and Stoughton, 1935. 315 pp. $27.95.

(Reviewed by

Ruth Zanker)

Keneally may have won the 1982 Booker prize with “Schindler’s Ark,” but his latest novel is his best yet. It is the strange story of the Kabbel clan, Belorussian patriots exiled in Sydney, and their violent end there.

The story is told from four interweaving points of view. The novel begins with the shocked reactions of Terry Delaney, the clean living Sydney-sider employed by the Kabbel security firm, who comes to realise that the Kabbel family loyalties transcend anything that a footy-playing Aussie innocent could understand. The three other points of view — letters from Rudi Kabbel’s sister in Paris, recently discovered diaries written by Rudi’s father during his time as Belorussian police chief under the Nazis, and Rudi’s reminiscences of his childhood under the Reich, present the origins of family self-delusion. Thee are two complementary themes at work here. These have inspired other Keneally works. First, there are the stunning documentary details of life in a backwater of the Reich where vindictive petty officials prove as lethal to dissidents and Jews as the larger acts of genocide in Warsaw or Auschwitz. Keneally’s massive researches for “Schindler’s Ark” must have suggested some of these. Certainly the cast is similar, except that, in “A Family Madness,” the good-hearted “Goy” is assassinated by partisans while the more brutal authorities watch.

Rudi’s father, a lawyer and white Russian patriot, trades co-operation with the Nazis for eventual Belorussian independence. For some Belorussians the German millenium promised an

end to “endless exile, , returns, coalitions, changed names, midnight flights.” As Germany came under siege, however, Stanislaw was forced to collaborate in more' and more desperate reprisals and atrocities against Communist partisans and Jews. When the family flees, in the wake of the Soviet invasion, to new names and identities in refugee camps, Rudi learns young that are subtle and that war-criminal is a relative and shifting term.” Compare this with the initial sunny innocence of Terry Delaney. His dreams are of brilliant first-grade football manoeuvres (there is some pungent writing on this Aussie subculture) and of mortgageless bliss with his wife, of Sicilian parentage, until he meets and falls in love with Danielle Kabbel. For him it is a creeping, unnerving experience to discover the subtley of events and his lack of power over them. He learns, too, that morality, once tampered with, becomes a relative and shifting nonsense. This is Keneally’s second theme, the exploration of some uncomfortable areas of contemporary Australian life. His first portrait of Sydney is of the bleak Social Welfare ‘'nine-to-five havens of municipal mercy.” His next picture is of desolate night-time Sydney where security men guard the wealthy and patrol empty car-lots to prevent industrial sabotage. Even mates look to self-interest or act out of avarice, lust or fear. Against this ignoble backdrop, Keneally can at times look with affection at the stiff-necked pride of the old exploited Catholic working class, like Terry’s parents. There are moments, too, when the apocalyptically violent delusions of the Kabbels appear morally chaste in contrast.