First of all, there is its involvement with history and even with journalism. Keneally, who recently launched Amnesty’s statement on the abuse of human rights in Ethiopia, on the torture, detention and execution of political opponents, is on the far side of their opponents, those they torture, the Eritreans, often characterised as ruthless rebels, who rob convoys of food destined for the starving Ethiopians. Towards Asmara paints a very different picture of heroic people fighting for the independence which no one in the world seems to want them to win, and fighting with honour, intelligence, and even with style-playing football between battles, for instance, and treating their prisoners generously. Their soldiers take classes in maths, science and languages. Even on the frontline, their people are tended by barefoot doctors and they have organised hospitals, schools, health care centres, mostly underground where they shelter from Ethiopian bombs.

According to one of the characters, an Englishwoman investigating the condition of African women for the Anti-Slavery Society, ‘these people have taken flight’, reached a ‘new level of moral being’. Women, for instance, are beginning to take their place with men in public life, in the professions and even in the army, as old prejudices, superstitions and customs like female circumcision give way to enlightenment. All this, of course, is seen in contrast with the ignorance and brutalities of the Ethiopians. The woman resistance leader Amna, for instance, with whom the narrator Darcy falls briefly but foolishly in love, has survived torture, and the description of her sufferings, of the prison full of tormented Eritrean patriots, makes grim reading.

Towards Asmara has a documentary and didactic quality. Keneally has actually been there and seen what he describes. But he is also, as always, a compelling storyteller. As usual, his characters are designed to interest: an American aid worker turned traitor for love; the English aristocratic Lady Julia wanting to undo the imperial past, indomitable, sympathetic, self-possessed and, finally humble; a lost daughter, a young Frenchwoman in search of her father, making a journey from troubled innocence to experience; her father, also French, called Masihi (the one who expects the Messiah) by the Eritreans, who is a fearless and brilliant cameraman filming the war for the Eritreans; an Ethiopian fighter pilot who agrees as a prisoner of war to helping the Eritrean rebels; and the narrator Darcy, the ironic alter ego we have come to expect from Keneally, ineffectual, confused and therefore vastly impressionable.

Around them a cast, if not of thousands, at least of hundreds of eager young soldiers (many of whom are women), stoic peasants and subtle, sophisticated leaders who come and go by mysterious ways to Europe as well as throughout their tormented country. Nor is this sophistication unbelievable. Eritrea is on the ancient trade route to Mecca, and the narrative captures something of the elusive sense of this past and the sophistication it gives.

This is all very interesting, topical and even quarrelsome, since it challenges conventional readings of the situation, from the left as well as from the right. But, oddly, the tone is strangely passionless, almost insipid, strangely at odds with the subject matter. What we might have expected and used to get from Keneally-energy, moral spice, outrage-is missing. That may be the fault of the narrator, a burnt-out case if ever there was one, a professional liberal and an expert in deserts who in fact risks very little, even in his marriage. He belongs nowhere, seems indeed no longer a native in the world, an inhabitant only of his own mind which seems to float free of all purpose and value, leaving him merely the prey of sensation and living in a state of entropy. His final disappearance from the story not only seems quite logical therefore but also tends to bring the story down with him. Irony her is debilitating rather than energizing. Yet one senses that the heart of the story is meant to be heroic, the struggle of a people living dangerously and definitely with a passion for freedom (a comparison is made with Poland) and the risky venture of a group of outsiders drawn with them on to a kind of frontier between meaning and meaninglessness.

It may be that, as Walter Benjamin predicted, in our time storytelling is becoming more and more difficult. Certainly one misses here the ambiguity and multiplicity, the noise and din, the lies as well as the truths which belong properly to a subject of this kind.

The fault perhaps lies in the form. Realism is a mode of perception as well as of Writing. It belongs to the status quo and all too easily becomes anaesthetic, habituating us, as it tends to do here, to the horrors it describes, turning them into a kind of cliché or referring to pre-digested situations and events like Bob Geldofs Band Aid, female circumcision in Africa, Aboriginal questions in Australia and so on. Perhaps, then, writers like Rushdie and Marquez are right. Maybe the only way of writing about history and politics today is fantasy, the way of subversion.

Whether or not something has happened to Keneally the storyteller, once so alive and active but now seeming to move away from us, taking with him that apparently inalienable and assured ability, the ability to exchange experiences. To lament this is, no doubt, old-fashioned. But that does not mean that it is unimportant or that it does not matter that Towards Asmara rings strangely hollow and seems in the long run to ignore the crucial issues it raises: Why do the Eritreans believe so passionately in themselves? What exactly do they believe in? And what is the ‘new level of moral being’ they are said to have reached? Why does freedom matter? And why is the Ethiopian government wrong? In what way? It seems to me that it would be good to know. But Keneally is not telling, or at least creates a narrator incapable of doing so. Story-telling thus becomes not a form of discovery therefore but of accommodation.

It may be, of course, that this is self-defence, a way of warding off the enormity and absurdity which Keneally has experienced personally-one thinks for instance of the image of legless soldiers polishing their shoes. But narrative of this kind is in danger of habituating us to a world at war, of taking the violence and torture as given and, for lack of anything else, finding value in sensation and suffering. That is not to say that Towards Asmara is not a thoughtful book. But it is to say that it calls us only to think, not re-think, to accept rather than protest. Keneally used to be a ‘literalist of the imagination’, able to give us real toads as well as real people in his imaginary gardens and, if not to bring the world quite round, at least to unsettle it. The way to make connections between writing and politics, I suspect, is to write better, that is, to make language work harder. There is an aesthetics of protest and a protest of aesthetics, as Wallace Stevens wrote:

Natives of poverty, children of malheur, The gaiety of language is our seigneur.