Ward’s misreading of Passenger is understandable. His claim that ‘Keneally is a fine writer, but not this time’ and ‘it is time he put up his typewriter and had a good think about just where he is next to go’, is consistent with the received opinion that Bring Larks and Heroes was Keneally’s last good novel, and that every subsequent work, not to mention his long ‘exile’ in Europe, has been a kind of artistic and cultural betrayal. But there are so many ways in which Passenger does not fit the cosy notion of infinite artistic regression, that it is hardly possible to do the novel justice in a review. One might begin with the simple fact that Keneally has returned to his ‘sacred’ style, the verbal forest of Bring Larks and Heroes in which every crypto-Irish syllable is handled like a consecrated sacrament. Bearing in mind the flat ‘profane’, almost unreadable prose of Season in Purgatory, it is much safer to speculate that whatever reassessment Keneally needs to undertake has already commenced.

So, with the daunting possibility that Great Tom will pop up his Gnome-like head and disagree, let me say that if he has in fact been in exile, Passenger is Thomas Keneally’s prodigal son. He has come home, though carrying a lot of luggage. The action of the novel begins in London and ends in Sydney. There is an explicit reapproach to the material and themes of Bring Larks and Heroes, but with more humour and subtlety, and a lot less Biblical earnestness. There is also a re-inhabitation of the old language, but with a more conscious irony directed-at the artistic process itself.

The ‘passenger’ is a foetus, carried by his mother Sal, who is married to an ignobly savage Australian journo in London, Brian Fitzgerald. The idea of the foetus-narrator is at once a beautiful joke and an embodiment of the quintessential wisdom of the noble savage sensibility, in one of the many variations of the primitive that Keneally orchestrates throughout this novel.

The foetus-narrator, while he at first seems an unlikely device, manages to establish himself as an authentic voice. There are moments of rare poignancy with the foetus, difficult to defend out of context, but real enough to refute Peter Ward’s criticism. Three that come to mind are the picture of the foetus weeping behind still-closed eyelids, or him swimming along in his waters in time to his mother’s strokes as she swims to shore having nearly drowned, or his single cry – ‘Sal’ – as he and his mother both fall unconscious to a massive dose of paraldehyde administered at the mental hospital into which she has been committed by her husband’s bastardry.

Keneally moves with ease in and out of the metaphysical issues, at once distinctively Catholic and Australian, which he had previously essayed in Bring Larks and Heroes. Like Halloran, Fitzgerald is a moral and emotional cripple, unable to satisfactorily relate the sacred and profane. His wife’s pregnancy, with the attendant connotations of mature womanhood, brings on a crisis. He is frightened, leaves his wife for a new girlfriend Annie, and wishes to terminate the pregnancy. A struggle develops between Brian and his unborn son. The foetus wins, by a combination of transmitted guidance to Sal and the enlisted aid of a hilariously unlikely foster-brother, nicknamed ‘The Gnome’. The Gnome is at once a Prospero figure representing the powers of civilisation in the primitive antithesis, and a high-camp mock-Superman. (Outrun by his Lois Lane Sal in a chase across London; himself brought up by American foster parents; melodramatically rescuing Sal from the mental home and flying her around the world, first class, to Sydney.)

Sal is writing a novel about Maurice Fitzgerald, Brian’s convict ancestor (a combination of Ewers, Hearn, and Halloran in Bring Larks and Heroes), so that the passenger, Foetus Fitzgerald, has his voyage into life paralleled by interspersed episodes of betrayal, salvation, and spiritual rebirth during and after Maurice’s voyage in chains out to colonial Sydney, in the ironically misnamed Minerva. Passenger ends with Brian accepting the once-feared son on the same day, a Sunday in February, that Bring Larks and Heroes had begun.

Keneally is revisiting other themes and novels in Passenger as. well. One of the characters, George the hip surgeon who executes his wife’s pet monkey in symbiotic atonement for the presumed death of the foetus, is the main character from Season in Purgatory, still recovering from his tour of duty with the Yugoslav partisans, and when Brian’s girlfriend Annie stands rumpling her copy of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines there is an irreverent reference to A Victim of the Aurora. There is also a return in Passenger to the sea-pastoral metaphors of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, touched on previously in Bring Larks and Heroes but here allowed to grow as the dominant metaphor in the novel. Melville is mentioned in the novel, as is Moby Dick. The event of the giant squid rising in Moby Dick is ghosted by a similar event in Passenger, and there is a constant permeation of voyage, water and fish imagery (as indeed one might expect of a tale told by a foetus).

It is also worth mentioning that, thematic and structural considerations aside, the prose narrative has an impressive sureness of touch. With only one or two minor lapses, where the voice momentarily trips over the literal, there is an accurate evocation of middle-class life, particularly that favourite domestic recreation of left-liberal Australia in the early seventies, the marital infidelity. So we learn of Sal’s hopeful seducer that:

Upstairs he always sat in too studied an ease on the floor by the Thames-seeing window. Look what a simple boyish man I am, he seemed to be saying. Director of the Hologram Research Unit, but here I am laying my arse and long legs on your humble floor.

But Keneally has little time in this novel for the kind of interpretive comments I’ve been making so far. As Sal plans her novel there is a reference to the fate suffered by Bring Larks and Heroes at the hands of the critics: ‘In what she wrote now Sal wanted to point up all manner of crafty ideas, such as that the guards are as surely imprisoned as are the convicts.’

The novel requires a sense of humour. This is implicit in the aesthetic paradox of the full title, Passenger: A novel. All art, we are reminded, is an illusion, and what had been the assured if impish literary-Irish authorial voice in Bring Larks and Heroes, has returned as a teasing, elusive ghost in the narrative, asserting its right to play, and preventing all illusion by insisting that the only reality is the Master Forger’s voice itself. As Sal is rescued by a young man who works at a Whale Beach bar called ‘the Moby Dick,’ we are told that ‘Propping her chin on the board, Sal cried, adding her lake salts, if you like, to those of the grand sea’.

If it does nothing else, with its off-hand dismissal of all earnest literary intentions, its frank celebration of style for its own sake; its elaborate self-parody, its search back through the shells of old novels to find a new one, Passenger should win Thomas Keneally the Roland Barthes Anti-Novel of the Year Award. Loss of direction is a current Western cultural fact, and Keneally is as much affected by it as are the rest of us.

There is, more importantly, the unavoidable sense that ‘the voice’ in Passenger, as it becomes less and less interested in maintaining the single illusion of ‘reality’, is weaving its way back through the Keneally oeuvre, the style, and perhaps the Keneally London experience itself, in order to effect a purge. Keneally’s ‘sacred’ mode has always been rather preciously over-rich. The narrator and characters alike are invested with an unbroken omniscience, the kind of adjudged rightness of phrase and tone we allow ourselves during rehearsals for arguments, or mental replays of unsuccessful conversations at parties. To that extent he has been a peeping-Tom on life, and if this ultimate birth of the unborn narrator in Passenger signals an attempt on Keneally’s part to open the door and step into the prose of ‘difficult ordinary’ life, then I admire his guts and wish him well.

On the other hand, Keneally is in many ways a radically uncreative writer. The feeling is very often that the novels are comprehensively researched and then written with the material kept squarely in view. It’s another version of peeping-Tomism, whereby the unrevealed model (for example Macbeth, on which he relies heavily for Bring Larks and Heroes) creates a false sense of density and passes for creative originality. When looking around for ‘this year’s adult novel’, to borrow his own way of putting it, he may well have turned to The Tempest, with its overt treatment of nature versus nurture, and written out the foetus as Ariel, The Gnome as Prospero, Sal as Miranda, and Brian as a Caliban who becomes a Ferdinand having voyaged to the brave new world. Or he may simply have dug up the files for the past ten years and tossed them up in the air. True or false, Passenger is worth reading.