My Favorite Living Novelist

An Appreciation

Only one living author has written more than four novels that mean a great deal to me.  And he has written seven. 

In less than 700 words and as simply as possible, I’ll do my best here to convey to you my appreciation of Thomas Keneally.

First, his range of topics, times, and places is remarkable. 

Second, he brings history to life as he pulls people out of their own time and provides them with emotional lives.

And third, his storytelling is never short of masterful.

Thomas Keneally is an Australian, born in 1935, and most of his novels are set in Australia.  But he’s a global novelist, with stories situated in historical and present settings throughout the world.    

Here are the seven Keneally novels I find most meaningful:

Office of Innocence (2003) is about a pure-intentioned priest whose every intervention ends up harming people.  The power of this novel is found in this well-developed, well-rounded character and in the tension of his moral dilemmas and choices. 

To Asmara (1989) brings empathy, compassion, and understanding to the struggle of both Ethiopians and Eritreans during violent conflicts between them.

Shame and the Captives (2014) is a gripping, disturbing, and ultimately haunting story about Japanese prisoners of war during World War II.  Getting into his characters’ heads and doing so empathetically, Keneally reveals something powerful about human nature.  Truly stunning.  

The Daughters of Mars (2012) is a great First World War novel.  It’s humane, compassionate, poignant, and moving.  The sweep of historical events dovetails with the emotional intimacy of characters of real depth. 

The Book of Science and Antiquities (2018) is both profound and brilliant.  Half the book is narrated by a Mango Man from 42,000 years ago.  Not only does Keneally honor our tribal ancestors; he offers us a range of insights into human nature.

Napoleon’s Last Island (2015) is a perfect novel on every measure of writing, with an extra dose of charm.  We encounter the defeated and former Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, exiled on St. Helena, as he is befriended by a high-spirited, even feisty, Australian teenager named Betsy.  The entire tale is told from Betsy’s point of view. 

The subject is not especially important, perhaps, but it’s an engrossing story and a delightful one and it’s ended up being my second favorite Keneally novel.  While he takes many liberties, it’s essentially a true story, and he handles events so deftly you feel like you’re there.

And that brings us to Schindler’s List (1982).  My favorite Keneally novel, even though he chose to tell the story in the dry form of a dispassionate journalist.  (He thus avoided moments of melodrama that would have marred the work.)

In fact, it barely qualifies as a novel.  It’s a true story, of course, with which he took just a few liberties – inventing parts of conversations that were not remembered verbatim.   

It’s difficult to separate in my mind the novel from Steven Spielberg’s film.  The novel is one of my ten favorite novels of all time and the film is one of my ten favorite films of all time.  I find both the novel and the film indispensable to understanding the whole story of Oskar Schindler. 

However dry the approach, for me the novel is gripping from one end to the other.  We owe a debt to Keneally for discovering this story and bringing it to us, and I believe it’s a book people will still be reading 100 and 200 years from now. 

The strength of the story, in the final analysis, rests on the strengths of Oskar Schindler himself.  He is the Third-Reich Era’s supreme, unsurpassed “Good German” – the one who saved 1,200 human lives.

What heroes can inspire us more than Germans like Oskar Schindler (and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Claus von Stauffenberg and the German Resistance) who stood up to Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich?  And what heroic individual besides Schindler can inspire us more profoundly than this flawed but ultimately virtuous man? 

As Keneally unveils to us, Oskar Schindler teaches us the value of human life.  And Oskar Schindler moves us to act from mercy and courage – and act against all odds – any time we step forward to defy the forces of darkness.