Thomas Keneally

Writer

• Born: October 7, 1935
• Place of Birth: Wauchope, New South Wales, Australia

AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST

Biography

Thomas Michael Keneally, one of Australia’s best-regarded and most prolific writers, was born to Catholic parents of Irish ancestry. He was educated at St. Patrick’s College in Strathfield, New South Wales, and studied first for the priesthood—the young priest in Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968) reflects Keneally’s training, and Keneally’s Catholicism pervades his novels—and later for a law career. He taught in a high school in Sydney from 1960 to 1964 before marrying Judith Martin in 1965, a year after he had published his first novel, The Place at Whitton (1964). Keneally later disparaged this novel, as well as the second, The Fear (1965), which he has termed the “obligatory” account of a novelist’s childhood. Despite his later disdain for these early novels, they won critical acclaim (the Miles Franklin Award in 1967 and 1968, and the Captain Cook Bi-Centenary Prize in 1970) and established Keneally as a leading novelist.

In 1966 and 1968, Keneally’s first two plays were produced, and in 1968, he became a lecturer in drama at the University of New England in New South Wales. His third novel, Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), is the account of a young soldier’s exile to Australia. It was followed by two novels in the English novel-of-manners tradition. In A Dutiful Daughter (1971), however, he abandoned the realistic psychological novel for an expressionistic portrait of an Australian family with two normal children and a mother and father who, from the waist down, are half cow and half bull. After A Dutiful Daughter, Keneally retreated from these fantastic extremes but retained his use of myths, fables, and parables.

In his post-1971 novels, he often focuses on historical figures, some of legendary or mythic stature. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), more accessible and more popular than A Dutiful Daughter, concerns a half-Aborigine forced into crime; Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974) examines the myth associated with Joan of Arc; and 1982's Schindler’s Ark (Schindler’s List in the United States) recounts a German industrialist’s activities helping tens of thousands of Jews escape death during the Nazi years. For the most part, with some exceptions, Keneally’s fictional world ranges chronologically from the time of Australia’s settlement by convicts (this is described in The Playmaker (1987), a novel written for the Australian centenary celebration) to the late 1980s. Although many of the later novels are set in Australia, Keneally transcends national boundaries in Gossip from the Forest (1975), which concerns the negotiation of the armistice in 1918; Victim of the Aurora (1978), an account of an Arctic expedition; and To Asmara (1989), a fictional account of the state of the Eritrean rebellion in 1987. He has also experimented with style, as in Passenger (1979), in which he moves from a realistic narrative that is almost factual in its attention to historical details to a narrative from the point of view of an unborn child.

Although Keneally’s work is challenging to characterize because of the diversity of style, subject matter, and setting, specific themes consistently permeate his work. His characters often seem guilt-ridden because of their involvement in an exploitative society or individual moral failures and isolation from others. Australian history may also account for his focus on the clash of cultures, which is best reflected in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1975), in which the White establishment is shown physically and spiritually raping the Aboriginal culture. Though Jimmie’s fate is the ostensible focus of the novel, justice is depicted as the product of nationalistic interests rather than individual guilt or innocence. In A Family Madness (1986), the clash of cultures involves twentieth-century Australians and descendants of Belorussian emigrants who came to Sydney in the late 1940s. Keneally suggests that the family is geographically but not psychologically free. Keneally draws heavily on his knowledge of Australian history and folklore, which he has also used in Outback (1984); he seems to have a divided sensibility, as James Joyce did, about his native country. The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980) establishes a parallel between the personal and the national in a novel that ponders the narrator’s and Australia’s appropriate role as spectator or participant in 1942.

Although he is acknowledged as one of the best Australian writers of the twentieth century, critics have expressed reservations about the speed and apparent ease with which Keneally writes (he is a prolific novelist). There is a question about whether he is an evolving writer or a random one. There is less disagreement about his willingness to address fictionally the most important issues of contemporary life: the Holocaust, colonialism, and political machinations, with their implications for the individual. To treat these issues, Keneally has used, fairly consistently, a style that is both fictional and documentary. One of the strengths of his novels is their historical authenticity. Yet, Keneally cannot be categorized in the popular tradition of such historical novelists as Irving Stone and Kenneth Roberts. When he draws on the accounts of Schindler’s acts, for example, his focus remains on Schindler, the person, not on the details of his work. Keneally’s willingness to address important issues and his ability to engage his readers, in addition to the popularity of the film adaptations of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Schindler’s List (1993), have made him an international writer.

Indeed, Keneally continued to publish both works of fiction and nonfiction at a rapid pace throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Though he did venture into American territory with the nonfiction books American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (2002) and Lincoln (2003), which was given as a state gift by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to US president Barack Obama in 2009, Keneally mainly continued to chronicle the history of his home country of Australia. From 2009 to 2014, he published three books in a multivolume series that focus on the biographies of individual Australians who have played some role in the country's history. At the same time, he wrote several more novels, including Woman of the Inner Sea (1993), Bettany's Book (2000), The Tyrant's Novel (2003), The Widow and Her Hero (2007), and The People's Train (2009). However, it was his 2012 novel The Daughters of Mars that received the most critical praise and attention. Spanning over five hundred pages, the book serves as Keneally's first foray into the significant topic of the battle at Gallipoli during World War I. While still managing to treat the subject of the war and battle as a whole, Keneally also provides a more unique angle on the event by focusing on two nurses charged with treating the wounded and dying soldiers. In 2014, he published Shame and the Captives, which skips ahead to World War II and tells the story of the Japanese prisoners of war who attempted to escape from an Australian prison and the effect that this breakout had on the surrounding community in New South Wales. The subject of Napoleon's Last Island, published around the time of Keneally's eightieth birthday in 2015, is that of the time that Napoleon Bonaparte spent with a British family while in exile on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. In 2015, Keneally was awarded by the Australia Council for his lifetime achievement in literature.

Keneally has continued his prolific writing career, adding the novels Crimes of the Father (2016), Two Old Men Dying (2018), The Book of Science and Antiquities (2019), The Dickens Boy (2020), Corporal Hitler’s Pistol (2022), and Fanatic Heart (2022) to his catalog. Keneally has co-authored a series of mystery books, known as the Monsarrat series, with his daughter Meg, and he has rewritten the nonfiction works Australians: A Short History (2016) and A Bloody Good Rant: My Passions, Memories and Demons (2022). 

Bibliography

Gelder, Ken. “‘Trans-what?’ Sexuality and the Phallus in A Dutiful Daughter and The Flesheaters (Analysis of Novels by Thomas Keneally and David Ireland).” Southerly, vol. 49, 1989, pp. 3–15.

Keneally, Thomas. “Thomas Keneally: 'When I Met Barbara Kingsolver I Burst into Geriatric Tears.'” The Guardian, 19 Jan. 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/19/thomas-keneally-when-i-met-barbara-kingsolver-i-burst-into-geriatric-tears. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Petersson, Irmtraud.“‘White Ravens’ in a World of Violence: German Connections in Thomas Keneally’s Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 14, 1989, pp. 160–73.

Pierce, Peter. Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1995.

Quartermaine, Peter. Thomas Keneally. New York: Viking, 1991.

Thorpe, Michael. Review of To Asmara, by Thomas Keneally. World Literature Today, vol. 64, 1990, p. 360.

Walton, James. “Thomas Keneally Interview.” The Telegraph, 7 Oct. 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/thomas-keneally-interview. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Willbanks, Ray. Australian Voices. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992.