What are we to make of a novelist whose lankly numinous attitude toward the womb is best likened to the Lord God’s intercessions with Israel’s long-suffering matriarchs? And Sarah laughed, you say. Perhaps. But both in salvation history and in the prodigious fiction of Australia’s Thomas Keneally, the fantastical fruits of the womb invoke awe and due reverence before the power and mystery of creation. Nothing, Sarah was reminded, is impossible for the Lord. Keneally, though he might insist on a different vocabulary, brings a similar sense of possibility to the world. He even gives his human creatures hoofs.
At fifty-four, this former seminarian—he demurred two weeks before ordination has written nearly twenty novels. He is perhaps best known for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, a historical novel about the clash of aboriginal and white cultures in nineteenth-century Australia, which was made into a movie. He was awarded Britain’s Booker Prize in 1982 for Schindler’s List, a novel based on the life of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist deeply implicated in the Nazi war machine and Final Solution who yet became a “god of deliverance,” saving more than a thousand Jewish concentration camp inmates.
The same author in his 1969 book, The Survivor, has staged the exhumation of a martyred explorer buried for forty years in the Antarctic ice. In Blood Red, Sister Rose, he vigorously reinvented Joan of Arc, giving her the earthy, egalitarian instincts of an “Australian country girl” and—or so he has said—the gutsy feminism of Germaine Greer. His ferocious vision of adolescence and the primal, immanent power of sex takes the form of a bizarre fable that is part Kafkaesque metamorphosis and part macabre situation comedy in A Dutiful Daughter.
Keneally is a brute of a novelist, determined to test his strength in a variety of forms and subjects. His fictive worlds range from Nazi concentration camps to eighteenth-century British penal colonies, from the exotic moonscape of a prelapsarian Australia to the leaden atmosphere and treacheries of a diocesan seminary, the setting for Three Cheers for the Paraclete. An assiduous craftsman, a subtle historian, Keneally renders with indelible detail the idiosyncratic texture of an epoch. The latrines of medieval castles and the autopsy techniques of an eighteenth-century military physician, along with a thousand other telling particulars, find a way into these novels.
But if Keneally has a visionary’s appetite for the historical tableau, he never forsakes the novelist’s conviction that human character and individual choice shape that history. These novels are enlivened by an eagerness to get at essentials and a wild prophetic sense of anger. Keneally has not been a novelist given much to the calculation of suburban manners, the conjurings of finance or realpolitik, the contrivances of power and status in modern mass cultures. His appetites are more basic, more enduring. Nor is he afraid to risk sentimentality. Keneally’s novels place people in extreme circumstances, encouraging the full play of his often mythological themes.
In the four novels under principal consideration here, a whiff of sulfur hangs in the air. The “Tawny Prince,” as the devil is called in The Playmaker, is an ineradicable presence. Scaffolds and other instruments of twisted human imagination preside over the landscapes. Blizzards, floods, the massed ferocity of modern war move against solitary, seemingly helpless human figures. In such vivid settings we get monsters of evil, such as Amon Goeth, the sadistic Nazi concentration camp commandant in Schindler’s List. Or monsters of virtue, like the passionate but obtuse canonist and bishop-elect, Costello, for whom hurrahs are ironically solicited in Three Cheers for the Paraclete. Or plainmonstrosities, like the proletarian and bewitched—the uddered and hoofed-Glovers in A Dutiful Daughter.
As an allegorist Keneally conjures up symbolic worlds. A desolate, primeval landscape—“a roaring darkness, a basic darkness, the type that breeds ghosts and visions, rituals for luck or salvation, religion itself—is the backdrop for the masquerades and crimes perpetrated at Campbell’s Reach in A Dutiful Daughter. In The Playmaker, an unexplored Australia, the very “other side of the moon,” lends its own aura to the crude human drama taking shape on its shores. Even amid the rough justice and stark passions of that desperate “penal planet,” the “word is made flesh” again, first in contriving the rudiments of social order, then in the miracles of playmaking and lovemaking. That incarnational imperative gives birth to a redeemed people. For Australia’s patriarchs and matriarchs-and the novel uses the actual names from prison registers-had been reprieved from the gallows of London’s infamous Newgate Prison.
Perhaps the most spectacular—certainly the most peculiar—expression of Keneally’s ontological concerns is A Dutiful Daughter, a darkly comic and portentous little fable with a manic apocalyptic tone. Life is a blood sport in this Australian netherworld, not an intellectual puzzle. Knowledge is paid for with one’s damnable flesh, as it is throughout Keneally’s work.
The monstrous and pathetic Glover (G-lover?) clan and its mad family romance is played out on the “least significant continent, the arsehole of the earth.” It’s a fable that might have been teased out of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. The limits of reason are bred in the bone here. The story is a feverish rebuke to the modern dogma of progress, the advertising world’s sacred doctrine of human perfectibility. Elsewhere Keneally condemns the corruption of the church, the heartless political economy of the state, both modern and mercantile. But he distrusts the promiscuous promises of rationalism and technology just as much.
The good Catholic Glovers are the most inept of dairy farmers. Damian, the family’s great hope, is returning home on college holiday. Like all families, the Glovers guard a host of profane secrets. Damian must return home to a farm where his parents pass a torturous existence as lumbering, human-headed cows. “The father” and “the mother” are victims of an absurd and terrible malady, which in the end is nothing so much as the human condition objectified and mythologized.
Damian’s college girlfriend, the innocently tolerant Helen, has marriage on her mind, and Damian is sorely tempted. But Helen is “a squaw by nature,” the desiccated product of a modern world that no longer believes in sin or the sacred. She can have no real sense of the profound violence, the irrational truth, embodied in the Glover family tragedy. A liberated woman, she approaches sex without any primitive sense of transgression. Damian recoils: “The path to her womb seemed suddenly as predictably laid down, with as much bland inevitability, as an expressway approach.”
Needless to say, the Glovers are Catholics of the “old mold.”
Nothing is clearly labeled around the Glovers’ ramshackle and torpid homestead. No, the Glovers inhabit a world where the unconscious and the transcendent fatally mix, and where a biblical plague of frogs or a river of blood might pass for an everyday occurrence. Damian harbors an unholy passion for the “bountiful mystery” of his older sister, Barbara, who is variously described as a “dark avatar,” “illimitable,” “the sign of contradiction,” and “the ultimate power against phantoms.”
Sex is still a violent revelation, an encounter with the ultimate, for the atavistic Glovers; it alters perceptions and transforms lives, holding up a mirror to the hidden logic of human nature. Sorting out the obsessive character of sexual desire means sorting out family love. In that forbidden funhouse mirror, Damian’s father, the “monstrous begetter,” has a hankering for heifers, while his mother prattles on about the evils of contraception, the “filth” of sexuality, and the deliverance chastity offers. “The mother,” as she is honorably regarded, even reckons her absurd, bloated misery a special sign from God.
Barbara Glover is the cause of these preposterous afflictions. Barbara’s menarche, the inevitable occurrence of which she had been kept ignorant of by her folkishly pious mother, triggered a release of suprahuman powers. At the moment when “the circuits of nature had been affirmed in her” Barbara had, in fury, fear, and perhaps pride, cursed her pathetic parents, turning them into ersatz centaurs. “They had found their bovine selves, and now loped on four hoofs and had angular quarters like all the poor Glover cattle.”
The parents’ reversion to their latent “bovine selves,” the story suggests, is the result of the “mighty shift in power and authority” conferred by the onset of a girl’s sexual maturity. Ripe with the promise and danger of life, Barbara had become a woman to be reckoned with. Barbara is a “witch” whose incipient womanhood has loosened the powers of creation. She is the sign and the incarnation of what is absolute and unfathomable, but also of what is most humanly abiding. She is Woman, with a capital W, the dark, uncontrolled, procreative force that mocks man’s futile Faustian effort at creating a world in his own image. Her powers are obscure but undeniable; they touch the beyond. But as such she is also the “dutiful” daughter, the guardian of hearth and home and the things of the earth; she harvests worms from the Glovers’ nearby beach, milks her mother, and remains silent about her father’s crimes, thus releasing her brother from the prison of family responsibility.
Keneally is a magician himself in this book, brilliantly giving dramatic life to every Oedipal fantasy. One particular genius of A Dutiful Daughter is to turn the archetypal parents’ lower regions-the unimaginable instruments of unimaginable acts- into frankly animal parts.
If, initially, we stand in horror and confusion before the Glovers’ bestial identities, we soon accede to the fable’s audacious scheme. Metaphorically, we come to understand the Glovers as the most ordinary of families, and life with these cow-people works with a remarkable power on a psychologically realistic level. These are the plodding, ruminant parents that sloppily wait at home for every adolescent; these are the beasts that haunt our dreams, the beasts we will become. In this sense, the Glovers are the voracious sexual monsters of Freudian conception: the father is driven to murderous debaucheries by his “bovine lusts,” while the mother becomes a caricature of womanly nurture, her teats swaying painfully from her enormous, fetid torso. “We don’t choose the lineaments of our needs,” temporizes the bull-like Mr. Glover, “and from most points of view coupling was disgusting, even eating was obscene.” Just how animal we are—and just how divine or damned the animal in us may be—is the imponderable at the heart of A Dutiful Daughter. In the best sense of the term, this is barnyard philosophizing and storytelling.
A Dutiful Daughter is perhaps Keneally’s most flamboyant attempt to dredge deep for the origins and meaning of human desire and emotion. But that pull toward the depths is evident in all the novels under consideration here. In most instances, the lineaments of our needs remain mysterious. Oskar Schindler’s heroic compulsion is linked to the contradictory notion of “sensual Oskar as a desirer of souls.” James Maitland, the irascible priest at the center of Three Cheers for the Paraclete, is the author of inexplicable charities and seemingly concomitant insubordinations. In The Playmaker, Lt. Ralph Clark is delivered over to a fuller reality when the play he is casting begins to reshape the actual lives of those involved. “You looked at a person and understood she’d always been there, a germ in the brain, a hint in the blood”; that is how love is defined in Blood Red, Sister Rose.
Keneally courts the dangers of melodrama to get at truths that lie beyond the modern devotion to irony. He writes from the gut as much as from the head. In the prologue to Schindler’s List and in the epilogue to The Playmaker, he admits as much. “Antibiotics and plumbing have made melodrama laughable to the modern reader,” he complains. Prosperity and privilege insulate us from some elemental understanding of who we are and what our place is in the order of things. (A not un-Christian thought.) As a novelist Keneally elevates the incalculable, the dark, irrational and yes, melodramatic, dimension of life. In this context, myth—the myths of history, and the myths of personal life—exposes the architecture of the human heart and soul. “For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself,” he writes of the myth that survivors honored about Oskar Schindler. Therefore, Schindler’s “unsubtle story,” his “pragmatic triumph of good over evil,” requires a certain literary indulgence. “For yes,” Keneally similarly writes of the unlikely heroes in The Playmaker, “though they are fantastical creatures, they all lived.”
That is as good an epigram for Keneally’s fiction as any critic could devise. Keneally—with the essentially religious view that life is a mystery that enfolds human beings, not a problem they can abstract and solve—develops his abiding themes: the incalculable nature of human motives, the enigma of virtue, the intoxications of evil, the limits of reason, the value and necessity of sacrifice, and the redemptive quality of love.
A Dutiful Daughter seems to have been written in some ways to answer, or certainly to echo, mythological questions raised in Three Cheers for the Paraclete. “We are not long out of the forest, really,” the bombastic Monsignor Costello was fond of warning his seminarians. James Maitland, who is forever crossing chasubles with his superiors, is tormented by the discrepancy between his educated faith in reason and the archaic truth he longs to embrace. Reason can illuminate only a portion of a man’s life, and is a notoriously cold comfort when contemplating the world’s disproportions and tragedies-especially a world where betrayal is the most intimate secret two people are likely to share. Saying Mass on a beach for a motley collection of 1960s refugees, Maitland wonders if “perhaps his hearers had never felt, as he did, that they and he had been separated from their origins in the earth, and that the hill, the sea, the dark, and the wind encouraged a tracing of the tragedy.”
It is not hard to see A Dutiful Daughter (and even The Playmaker) as just such an anthropological tracing. The connection is encouraged by the elegiac tribute to the doomed Glovers at the end of the novel. What, the narrator asks, will the future make of the Glovers’ “curious remains”? Barbara and her parents are swept away in a cataclysmic flood, buried “eons or fathoms deep.” But the truth of the Glovers’ condition is also buried deep within each of us. The human body, with its odd assortment of parts, is not less or more “reasonable” than a cow’s body. Whatever the shape of the body or its needs, it betrays us in the end. As St. Paul lamented, we are not even masters of our own will. Barbara Glover finds her strength inadequate before the mystery of her own nature. The only source of humility, hence understanding, against animal and “family pride” is to accept-indeed to honor sacramentally—the dying beast within. “Only a God is worthy to look at us,” Barbara tells her parents. “Only a God is worthy to pity such great wounds.”
Father Maitland, the brilliant academician, is looking for that kind of fierce pity. If his faith is moribund, he is still a man who needs his vows to be taken seriously. Indeed, he wants the church to hold him to his oaths, something the secular world, awash in its “loveless Scandinavian furniture,” has no interest in doing. So even after exposing the intellectual fallacies of his detractors, Maitland clings to the “great scandalous body, that infamous but mystical corporation they called the church.” He’s an “institutional” man, bound if not gagged. In this unreasoning loyalty Maitland is like Barbara Glover (and Oskar Schindler). “No love is ideal,” Barbara tells Damian. “We’re cemented you, me, them. That’s what decides what you’ll be-the way you’re locked. You can’t risk those you unavoidably love.”
Maitland is locked into relationships that bring on an absurd, often very funny, succession of contretemps and end with him before an inquisitional panel convened to determine his fate as a priest. In self-reproach he observes, “Their God was a kinsman, not an absolute, not a void in the heart.” Caught between a church whose standards are merely self-serving (“Obedience,” Maitland’s superior tells him, “is better than any other thing on the earth.”) and a secular world stupefied by a prosperity that turns every human sentiment into a commodity, Maitland struggles to hold on to his sense of mystery. He wants to believe in a “God of lightnings,” the cosmic power that shook and ripped the earth and heavens into existence, and must in some manner sustain creation. He gets close to it in sacrament. Celebrating Mass on the wind-swept beach he is struck by “the sense that what he performed had an affinity with the earth and the elements of the blood.”
Honoring that sense of connectedness and consecration, of simple, enduring human dignity, is paramount in Keneally’s work. He shows a profound feeling for what Rudolf Otto defined as the sense of “the holy.” A sense of awe and dread, a mixture of attraction and repulsion exists wherever people press against the boundaries of things. In Three Cheers Maitland prays—unavailingly, to be sure—for a “scalding sight of God which disrupts the network of his senses and rearranges them on a higher level... [making him] aware of the underlying astringency of the Other’s existence.” That dread astringency is much like Miguel de Unamuno’s assertion that although the Catholic “solution” cannot satisfy our minds, it will satisfy our wills and, therefore, our lives. “The God we desire,” Unamuno writes, “the God who will save our soul from nothingness, the immortalizing God, must needs be an arbitrary God.”
Maitland endorses that religious idea when discussing the blasphemous modern worship of individual will power. “Yes, you can be a saint if you want to,” he says. “But then, what’s the use of the idea of the divine, what’s the use of mystery, rite, myth, the whole caboose, if you can be the man you want to be.”
What’s the use, indeed. In these novels people fail miserably at being who they set out to be, only to prevail at inexplicable vocations. Schindler is the most dramatic example. At first content to pursue nothing but pleasure and an easy fortune, he eventually finds himself risking everything and matching wits with the devil incarnate. The irony is intensified, as is the novel’s heart-rending sense of human frailty, when Schindler fails at the simpler business of making a living after the war. This very human “god of deliverance” is in turn sustained by those he had risked his life to save. For Schindler to have been “exalted” when all around him conspired with an absolute evil, only to falter in a world of easy virtue, is one of the story’s most authentic mysteries.
Schindler, “one of the church’s least observant sons,” was little more than a German war profiteer eager to follow the victorious Nazi army into Poland. A drinker, chronic philanderer, con-artist extraordinaire, he was no moralist in any conventional sense. No, Schindler did not possess a religious sensibility or a refined sense of social justice. Rather, it was his worldliness, his instinct for the concrete, his anachronistic respect for taboo, that allowed him, like the Glovers, to be “bullied by God.” His reaction to Nazi crimes was instinctive; as unavoidable as Barbara Glover’s obligations. “The revulsion Herr Schindler felt was of a piquant kind, an ancient, exultant sense of abomination-of the same sort as, in a medieval painting, the just show for the damned. An emotion, that is, which stung Oskar rather than unmanned him.”
That is a revulsion, one can’t help but suspect, the author finds conspicuously absent in a modern world that tirelessly boasts of its ability to adapt to anything. Schindler, with his “heroic liver,” is a saint of the old school, not a pious moral bookkeeper, but a fallible man put to good and miraculous use by God. No psychological analysis of his selflessness is offered. Like the hidden movements of love, Oskar’s heroism defies categorization. Explanations would distort the truth. Bearing witness, telling the story, is the only way to make this moral reality accessible.
Lieutenant Clark, in The Playmaker, is also the victim of circumstance. He goes to Australia a happily married man hoping to further his military career. His exile, the unsettling power of the place, and the accident of being ordered to stage a play, turn him into another man: into a different husband and father, a more ambivalent jailer, another kind of Christian.
Provost Marshal Harry Brewer, Clark’s most pathetic companion, is an embezzler, an alcoholic, a coward, and cuckold. Yet his helpless, squalid devotion to the convict girl, “Duckling,” engenders a loyalty that in the end alters the balance of power in the colony, while brilliantly dramatizing the absolute mystery of human love.
As Janette T. Hospital wrote in Commonweal (May 7,1976), Keneally’s heroes and heroines are “reluctant prophets,” whose fates are shaped by overmastering forces. Ralph Clark, who must police the exile of Australia’s convict settlers, is as much a prisoner as the men and women he commands. Away from his wife and child, Clark is beset by nightmares. He’s “the most notorious dreamer in the colony” of Sydney Cove. Once again, as with Barbara Glover, the power over “loss, desire, jealousy”—the most human things—rests with women. In this case, it is the province of the “she-lags,” the female convicts who are a continual source of sexual temptation.
Secret and blasphemous covenants govern their violent world. The legalistic Christianity of the powerful, represented by the penal colony’s sanctimonious minister, is no match for the primitive spiritual power of the dispossessed. Nor can it make much of Australia and its aboriginal people, a continent apparently forsaken even by the Flood. “For this was a new state of being. The eight-moon passage to this place had been nearly as absolute a change as death.. .and therefore altered morality.”
Clark’s nightmares, his “Pharaoh-like burden of dreaming significantly,” are exorcised through the sexual ministrations of the she-lag, Dabby Bryant, a sorceress of very palpable gifts. “He knew it was specifically the seed of his dreams that he was about to pass to her, and that the chance must be taken instantly,” Clark judges.
A heavily freighted understanding of sex is in varying degrees present throughout Keneally’s work. In acting on this curious prompting, Clark acknowledges the insufficiency of his own powers and will. To the extent that sexual need humbles us, it makes us more human, more open to the ineffable quality of existence. This notion is not far removed from the troublesome Catholic prescription that regards sex as unfulfilled if it does not remain open to procreation. In The Playmaker, the mystery of love carries us beyond ourselves to the very root and meaning of creation. Crude, fleshly love is where the spirit manifests itself most emphatically, and with frequently unforeseen consequences.
For example, Clark’s eventual surrender to the she-lag, Mary Brenham, for whom he had guiltily nurtured a passion, is presented as a kind of epiphany. In choosing love, even adulterous love, Clark acts once again on the desire for salvation. Keneally’s women are Madonnas of various sorts even when offering themselves as the most carnal of intercessors. Clark is granted a moment of wholeness with Mary Brenham, and finds the completeness of the world in giving himself to her. She receives the same gift in return. Keneally is very much like Norman Mailer-or an orthodox Catholic theologian-in endowing sex with such sacredness. As Mailer wrote in The Prisoner of Sex, the sexual act has a “meaning which went to the root of existence, or it did not.... For it is obviously difficult to live with a metaphysics where humans are endowed with design yet the act which makes them is empty of it.” In other words, we are either made in God’s image or we are not.
A design is evident in the sexual experiences of both Lt. Clark and Barbara Glover. But Keneally is not a reductionist naively claiming that love conquers all, nor is he a moralist affixing abstract value to subjective feeling. Sex is a kind of sacrament in these novels, preserving its transcendental reality regardless of how people use it. In this context, Keneally’s characters are never more fully themselves than when acquiescing to “those they unavoidably love.” Maitland is finally his own man in accepting the discipline of his bishop. Barbara Glover discovers the truth about herself in humility. Schindler is “exalted” not by his own will, but by an “ancient, exultant sense of abomination” that placed an absolute value on human dignity. In each instance, these men and women recover an identity that transcends egotism in the act of self-sacrifice. In unconditionally giving up themselves they receive the gift of their true selves in return. In letting go, they take possession of their lives.
But if Keneally’s heroes and heroines participate in some greater redemptive reality, it is never a question of easy grace. Most often these tales have the emotional and spiritual quality associated with the story of Abraham and Isaac. Again and again, we are returned to the impossible human moment when Abraham, in allegiance to a greater duty, raises his knife against his only son—moments in which a humbling creatureliness is fully recognized. Barbara Glover is so bound to her family, Maitland to his church, Clark to his prisoners/players/lover. Schindler’s List is a litany of such choices, the most tragic of which is a doctor’s decision to give his patients cyanide rather than allow the Nazis to kill them. “These things were never a matter of calculating sums,” the doctor says. “Ethics was higher and more tortuous than algebra.”
Keneally’s fictional world admits of a God, but it is for the most part the astringent Other whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways. The dark realm of the human spirit and God’s silence in the face of evil predominate. For hope to exist in this world, like the hope Schindler inspired in his Jewish workers, it must transcend “mere realism”: it must approach myth or religious truth. One survivor thinks of Schindler: “She feared his friendship. She wanted him to continue to be a presence, a magical parent. A paradise run by a friend was too fragile. To manage an enduring heaven, you needed someone both more authoritative and more mysterious than that.”
The unlikely Schindler becomes just such a presence, a kind of Jacob who uses his native shrewdness to secure a future for his people. Schindler reawakens the possibility of life where only death existed. “Only madmen made promises absolute as that,” one survivor thought of Schindler’s guarantee of safety. “Yet he wasn’t mad. For he was a businessman with a dinner to go to. Therefore, he must know. But that means some second sight, some profound contact with God or devil or the pattern of things. But again, his appearance, his hand with the gold signet ring, wasn’t the hand of a visionary. It was a hand that reached for the wine; it was the hand in which you could somehow sense the latent caresses.”
The incarnational nature of Keneally’s cosmology resounds in this image of Schindler’s hand, with its juxtaposition of the carnal and the divine. The spirit dwells in the flesh; what is timeless is manifest in every passing moment. In these novels the ultimate order of things has, to borrow another Unamuno phrase, a “human finality.” Human existence is felt to be incomplete; our destiny is to seek a consummation that repairs the broken world. To secure an everyday reality, we need to know that our acts live on beyond death. For this to be accomplished we ask that suffering be justified, that our wounds be pitied. The life of the prisoner and the exile are paradigmatic, for their lives are rooted elsewhere.
This is the world testified to in the familiar lyrical petition that begins “Hail, holy, Queen, Mother of Mercy,” and goes on to describe how we, the poor banished children of Eve, send up our sighs, mourning and weeping from this valley of tears. After this our exile, it concludes, our lives will be fulfilled thanks to the blessed fruit of a woman’s womb.
Like that simple prayer, Thomas Keneally’s varied fictions root us realistically in the suffering and incompleteness of the world. But if Keneally’s characters know banishment in their bones, they also are summoned to a greater destiny. If some call that melodramatic, so be it, for we are all fantastical creatures.
