fiction
A PLENITUDE OF STORY
Peter Pierce
Thomas Keneally
Bettany's Book
Transworld, $43.85hb, 605pp
1 86471 000 4
IT'S FIVE YEARS SINCE Thomas Keneally's last novel, A River Town, although published a couple of years ago was his massive study of the nineteenth-century Irish diaspora, The Great Shame. In the meantime he had pent up all his fictional energies, his distinctively benign and superstitious apprehension of the world, his sense of the plenitude of story in Australia. The result is his longest and one of his most exuberant novels, Bettany's Book.
Or books perhaps: not only is this a time-shuttling work, moving between early colonial Australia and the 1980s, and one set substantially in the Sudan as well as this country, but it bristles with other novels that might have been, stories only intimated or truncated as Keneally deals with the larger technical problems that he has set himself. On a much smaller scale, Robert Drewe confronted a similar task with his first novel, The Savage Crows(1976), where the colonial and modern sections, the 1820s and the 1970s, were linked thematically in their treatments of guilt, remorse, the delinquency of fathers.
What connects the two historical periods of Bettany's Book is more accidental, if not tenuous. It is the force of our random connections by blood as by chance, and their resistance to too earnest interpretation. One-hit film-maker Dimp Bettany (who won fame if not fortune with the movie of an Italian POW in Australia, titled Enzo Kangaroo no less) comes into the possession of the journal of her ancestor, the pastoralist, Jonathan Bettany. This relates his struggles to establish himself on a sheep run in southern New South Wales, where he is troubled more by matters of sex and conscience than the traditional enemies of Australian saga fiction: fire, flood, drought, Aborigines, white outlaws. While Dimp engrosses herself in Jonathan's journals, her sister Prim (Dimple and Primrose were the names their deceased parents blessed them with) is far from Australia, fleeing an academic scandal all of her American supervisor's making in order to work for Austfam in the Sudan.
Many of the stories that Keneally has told so vividly already are instinct in Bettany's Book. This Australia is complicated, ulitmately for its good, by transported political agitators (in this case English rather than Irish). Its Aboriginal peoples are treated -- as has always been Keneally's way -- as if they were human, neither caricatures nor people doomed to extinction, and a perennial call to conscience and understanding. In its moral essence this is a story of mutiple betrayals and the reckoning of guilt. Signature events of Keneally's fiction recur: a convict's damning letter, a terrible hanging which is at the novel's core. In its modern world, sectarianism survives, whatever is pretended on the surface of public life. Keneally's relish for inside knowledge of opaque and supposedly glamorous professions is at play here -- in the portrayal of the film industry and of the plethora of acronyms of the NGOs that try to distribute wealth to the Third World and might not miss the chance to proselytise as they go.
So there are echoes of numerous previous novels of his. One feels at times that in Bettany's Book, Towards Asmara (1989), has met Woman of the Inner Sea (1992). The crises of the sisters' long relationship with unexpected and perhaps unsuitable men is one of the keynotes of the contemporary section of the novel; their trials are anticipated in the two marriages of Jonathan Bettany. Keneally brings the same moral astuteness and delicacy to these entanglements as he did to those of Kate Gaffney in Woman of the Inner Sea. The pathos and politics, the nobility and corruption that he discerned, as a partisan but not as a sentimentalist about Eritrean independence in Towards Asmara, suffuses the depiction of the Sudan this time, and especially the issue of child slavery.
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