The Survivor by Thomas Keneally

First published: 1969

Type of work: Tragi-comedy

Time of work: The mid-1960’s

Locale: Australia and Antarctica

Principal Characters:

• Alec Ramsey, the Director of Extension studies at a provincial Australian university and a former Antarctic explorer
• Ella Ramsey, his wife
• Belle Leeming, the widow of Stephen Leeming, the famous Antarctic explorer
• The Poet, an Australian man of letters and Ramsey’s confidant

The Novel

Alec Ramsey, sixty-three years old, is the last survivor of the polar expedition of the mid-1920’s in which Stephen Leeming died in the last dash for safety. Ramsey and another man, Dr. Lloyd, who were with Leeming, buried him on the trail and managed to save themselves.

Ramsey, who was a sportsman of some repute before the trip and who has continued to have something of a public life, has a reputation for being reticent and sometimes thin-skinned about Leeming’s death. The novel opens with Ramsey’s walking out of a Rotary Club meeting at which he was to speak, enraged because of innocent, if callous, prying into the matter. This sensitivity often affects his work for the school, and it is known that he is often too emotionally fragile to fulfill his duties. Two assistants, one of them, Pelham, understanding but often irritated by having to do much of Ramsey’s work, and another, Kable, ambitious and unscrupulous, are waiting apprehensively for Ramsey to retire.

Ramsey is also having difficulty in his personal life. A man identified only as “the poet” is badgering the unfortunate Ramsey to allow him to write on the old explorer’s Antarctic experience (despite this, the poet becomes a friend and confidant). Ramsey’s wife is not always sympathetic to his aching, debilitating sense of guilt. Despite the fact that the incident occurred more than forty years ago, Ramsey cannot forget two things: that immediately prior to the expedition he slept with Leeming’s wife, and that Leeming, although dying following a stroke, may still have been alive when Ramsey and Dr. Lloyd (a physician who had declared him dead) left Leeming behind. The doctor, on his own deathbed several years later, was teasingly ambiguous about the matter.

Ella Ramsey knows about the sexual adventure, but Ramsey has kept the second secret to himself. It is announced that members of an American polar expedition believe that they have come across Leeming’s body, and Ramsey identifies bits of equipment which were left at the site. The question is not only whether they have actually found him but also what to do with the body Ramsey wants it left alone, in part because it seems fitting that the great explorer should remain where he fell, but also in fear of the discovery of some evidence which might indicate that Leeming was not dead when Ramsey and the doctor went off to save themselves.

The rest of the novel occupies itself with a mix of university chicanery centered on Ramsey’s increasingly erratic behavior under the pressure of constant intrusions by the media, and on the permutations and combinations of political fighting within the closed community of academics vying for power privilege, and occasional sexual favors. Ramsey’s problems take a nasty turn when Belle Leeming’s nephew, a notoriously undependable junior academic at the university, offers to go to Antarctica to retrieve his uncle’s body. Ramsey knows that he will turn the whole thing into a circus and that, if there is any question of irregularity about the death, the nephew will make a thundering scandal of it.

Eventually, Ramsey goes himself and discovers Belle Leeming on the same plane. At the last minute, he loses his nerve and attempts to stop the disinterment of the body, but he is literally knocked flat for his efforts. The body proves that Ramsey had no need to feel guilty about leaving his leader behind, and Belle Leeming educates him concerning the sexual life of his hero and dispels his guilt over their old erotic encounter. Ramsey is as new a man as he can be at sixty-two and does not retire, much to the chagrin of Pelham, the good man, and Kable, the dirty thruster.

The Characters

After the revelations at the conclusion of the novel, it is easy to see that Alec Ramsey is a bit of an innocent in idealizing Leeming as he has, despite the fact that he is a man over sixty. Ramsey ought to have known better or at least to have made some attempt to find out the truth about Leeming and his death. It is difficult for the reader to think of Ramsey in quite that way, however, because it is his wry, often cunning, and rarely fooled common sense with which the third-person narrator identifies much of the time. Ramsey is unaggressive, but he is nobody’s fool, and the style of wise and witty distance which dominates and shapes the tone of the novel is shared by him and the narrator.

Style is, in large part, the key to Ramsey’s character as he moves through the corridors of university power, often taking the skin of hypocrisy and self-interest off everyone and everything in sight. This same capacity for looking through pretentious facades and around corners of dubious intention is allowed Ramsey’s wife, Ella, who is more than simply a pretty middle-aged face and who can turn a memorable phrase of genially destructive intent quite as quickly as can Ramsey himself. She is particularly memorable in the way that she can use her intelligence and good sense to try to strip Ramsey of his cloak of psychological gloom.

The poet, who is teasingly unnamed (one suspects that Thomas Keneally had someone well-known in Australian literary circles in mind, though it may be a bluff, for everyone has heard of the itinerant anarchist poet working his way through the universities of the world boozing, blaspheming, and bedding willing females, a la Dylan Thomas), is blessed with the same laser-beam mentality and the ability to express it. What is peculiar is the way in which the narrator, Ramsey, Ella, and the poet resemble one another; they all express themselves in a preternaturally intelligent, mannered style allowing for insights that not only function in terms of character and narrative but also are stunningly pleasurable for their own sake. All four of them simply say things well, and much of the character of Ramsey, Ella, and the poet consists of how they think about things and express themselves.

Keneally’s wit and sensitivity to how people express their character in what they say and how they say it is, at times, used to the disadvantage of some characters. The Kables, husband and wife, use language and ideas to personal advantage, and they pick their way through conversations as if they were panning for gold, always alert for something in their favor. In a similar way, Keneally lets Professor Sanders, an academic lounge lizard, sink himself in the line of the amorous cooing he tries on Ella. This scene is funny and cruel at the same time, in the manner of classic satire.

Critical Context

Keneally goes back to the Antarctic theme in a later novel, A Victim of the Aurora (1977), but that work, although it has slight similarities to The Survivor, is much more of a piece in its tonal seriousness, and it takes the idea of betrayal on the ice to the point of murder. The Survivor illustrates Keneally’s gift for thematic and tonal range, and it is particularly useful for dispelling the idea that he is always committed to deeply serious subjects. This is not to suggest that Ramsey’s problems are not of some moment but that Keneally’s gift for comedy and satire and for writing with rococo rubato (without falling over into cuteness) is generously used in this novel. His later novels have, in the main, been committed strongly to themes of emotional depth, although there are flashes of his comic gift in The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980), his novel about Australian politics during World War II.

He also has the gift of being a regional novelist without being provincial and his reading of Australian character, at its best in its forthright suspicion of cant and at its worst in its rough-hewn awkwardisms, runs subtly through the work. Ramsey is a common sort of protagonist for Keneally, decent, intelligent, unimpressed by power, and susceptible to taking his own failures too seriously: the image of the perfect Australian gentleman (although “gentleman” might be too pretentious a word for a man of a country sensitive of its British connections.)

Bibliography

Donahugh, R. H. Review in Library Journal. XCV (March 15, 1970), p. 1048.

Keesing, Nancy. Australian Postwar Novelists, 1975.

Keneally, Thomas. “Origin of a Novel,” in Hemisphere. XIII, no. 10 (1969).

Kiernan, Brian. “Fable or Novel? The Development of Thomas Keneally,” in Meanjin Quarterly. XXXI (1972), pp. 489-493.

Kiernan, Brian. Images of Society and Nature, 1971.

Levin, Martin. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXII (September 27, 1970), p. 48.

Ramsom, W. S. The Australian Experience: Cultural Essays on Australian Novels, 1974.