Call number
FIC KEN
Collection
Genres
Publication
Plume (1994), 277 pages
Description
A young woman once told Thomas Keneally her life story. It was to lodge in his mind and haunt his imagination, becoming the kernel for this enthralling and emotive novel. It tells of a marriage that becomes a nightmare, of a distraught woman's flight, actual and symbolic, into the Australian interior, a story of pursuit, tragic accident and a final, strange catharsis.
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
I read a couple of Thomas Keneally’s novels about 25 years ago, when I was going through a craze for all things Australian, but I've rather lost sight of him since then. I don't think I was particularly impressed back then, but this book has made me rethink a bit. I will have to look a bit more
This is a rather different kind of novel from Schindler’s List and The Playmaker. The setting is contemporary (1990s), the mood is not so much polemical as affectionately satirical. Keneally sends up the stock clichés of Australianness - on the one hand the jet-setting Sydney middle classes, with their sleazy basis of gambling and political corruption underwritten by big business, the unions, the Catholic Church and the Labour Party; on the other hand the ugliness and isolation of rural small towns where “battlers” try to scrape a living in the face of the implacable forces of nature. In a plot that’s clearly meant to take the mickey out of both Patrick White and Peter Carey, Keneally has his central character, a damaged Sydney sophisticate, seek redemption by becoming a barmaid and eating a lot of greasy food. Naturally, there's an Epic Disaster Scene (with more than a hint of Henry Lawson) and a mystical relationship with a transcendental kangaroo (D.H. Lawrence!?!) thrown in for good measure.
This might all sound like too much of a good thing, but Keneally handles it surprisingly deftly. It feels like a novel that is first and foremost about someone going through a real crisis, not like a magical mystery tour of Australian Literature with a story tacked on to it. We do get to identify with Kate, despite all the bells and whistles.
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closely at what he has written.This is a rather different kind of novel from Schindler’s List and The Playmaker. The setting is contemporary (1990s), the mood is not so much polemical as affectionately satirical. Keneally sends up the stock clichés of Australianness - on the one hand the jet-setting Sydney middle classes, with their sleazy basis of gambling and political corruption underwritten by big business, the unions, the Catholic Church and the Labour Party; on the other hand the ugliness and isolation of rural small towns where “battlers” try to scrape a living in the face of the implacable forces of nature. In a plot that’s clearly meant to take the mickey out of both Patrick White and Peter Carey, Keneally has his central character, a damaged Sydney sophisticate, seek redemption by becoming a barmaid and eating a lot of greasy food. Naturally, there's an Epic Disaster Scene (with more than a hint of Henry Lawson) and a mystical relationship with a transcendental kangaroo (D.H. Lawrence!?!) thrown in for good measure.
This might all sound like too much of a good thing, but Keneally handles it surprisingly deftly. It feels like a novel that is first and foremost about someone going through a real crisis, not like a magical mystery tour of Australian Literature with a story tacked on to it. We do get to identify with Kate, despite all the bells and whistles.
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Pages
277
ISBN
0452271770 / 9780452271777