Keneally's newest narrator [in Passenger] is a foetus, a pugnacious little fellow who's been jolted into omniscience by a hologram taken to establish his sex. As the laser beams 'pepper up his cortex,' lovely Sal Fitzgerald's passenger becomes 'arrantly awake' to his family history, his father's infidelities, and the threats to his own existence….

Passenger is a witty variant on the picaresque tradition, jauntily sustained, and versatile, in that the narrative contrivance, itself fantastical, allows the fantastical developments. But we have to be insistently reminded of how much the foetus-hero knows, and it's hard for Keneally not to be cute about the little man ('I ground my fist against my sealed left eye') nor to indulge in this kind of amniotic rhapsody: 'I rode the warm estuaries of Sal's blood and heard it singing.'

Fortunately the novel is solidified by a recurrent parallel between the foetus...