AustLit

'Paul Sharrad has established a reputation as a first-rate, archivally-oriented literary scholar, and this book adds considerably to that repute. It is a quite stunningly detailed case and career study of a major postcolonial author, Thomas Keneally, and of his hard journey as a talented young writer emerging improbably from a plebeian Sydney suburb and somehow re-inventing and sustaining himself as a professional author for fifty years, writing classics such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), a grim, bloody tale of a young Aborigine’s violent response to the experience of colonial racism, and Schindler’s Ark (1982), his remarkable study of Oskar Schindler, a German profiteer whose Cracow factory became a place of refuge for Jews set for execution under Nazism. Sharrad calls Schindler’s Ark a “not wholly fictive book […] that earned [Keneally] his greatest literary award, sales and renown” (157). This “faction” account of a tortured Catholic businessman won Keneally the 1982 Booker Prize and was developed into a Spielberg movie. Sharrad explains how Keneally can be esteemed as a serious literary figure in Australia and an entertaining, popular writer elsewhere, noting, importantly, that “Keneally’s career happens not just as a series of runs in the same event: it is a combination of novel, drama, history, screen-writing” (199). Keneally has produced highly-charged ethical narratives exploring human redemption in a series of works which has comprised thirty-five novels, two children’s books, seventeen works of non-fiction, seven plays, eleven TV, film and radio scripts, and numerous essays.' (Introduction)