"The Dickens Boy" by Thomas Keneally

 The fictionalised biography of Edward 'Plorn' Dickens, son of the famous novelist. Plorn, an academically challenged sixteen-year-old who has never read his father's books, is sent to Australia to become a sheep-rancher. We learn a great deal about the frontier Australia of the day, about sheep-farming and the newly-dispossessed aborigines, and the logistical and social contexts of farming a remote homestead. Plorn's experiences of love and loss, of kindness and hatred and danger, and his gradual understanding of sex and its relation to the scandalous divisions between his mother and father, help him to grow up.

This is a slow-paced book, gently told. The essential themes are 'coming of age' and the difficulties of being a normal son of a famous father. But the problem with 'true' stories is that some events happen and then other ones do, without the unification imposed by a nove's structure. For example, what promises to be a major character dies quite early in the narrative and another fades out. Then other characters have to arrive to carry the story. And some situations, as in real life, never get fully resolved. While this adds verisimilitude, it makes the book less of a  page-turner. Certainly I was less motivated to read it than by Keneally's most famous book 'Schindler's Ark', the bionovel on which 'Schindler's List' was based (the book is better because it really explores the shadowy fringes of heroism). 

Selected quotes:

• "How far did the reverberations of my famous father reach? Colonies of birds in the desert oaks were engaging in the last clamorous parliament of their day, but Dickens was in the hut at the heart of Ullollie!" (Ch 7)
• "I'd felt inexpressibly strange and even repelled by the idea of my father and mother being one flesh and sharing somehow the stew and the sanctity of that." (Ch 9)
• "The priest uttered his benediction in Latin and very exactly quartered the air to make a cross above the company's heads." (Ch 26)
• "This performer strove for relevance by means of volume." (Ch 33) The context suggests that the performer was loud but it could be read as a snide comment of writers such as Dickens who, at least in Plorn's view, achieve their effects by the quantity of their text.

April 2022; 390 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God