[In "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith"] Thomas Keneally has chosen an actual incident—in 1900, when the disparate [Australian] states were rapidly but uneasily moving toward federation—around which to weave a powerful and disturbing fiction: the growth of a half-caste young man, Jimmie Blacksmith, from Methodist "mission black" to murderer and outlaw. Here are the trappings of "In Cold Blood"—rural isolation, slaughter, manhunt—but the impulse, the motivations and, most important, Keneally's highly charged and distinctive style are quite different.

Jimmie has been sharpened yet confused, made ambitious yet is uprooted, by the thin nurture of Christianity and other Western notions. Behind him lie the impoverished and debased lives of such people as his uncle Tabidgi and his half-brother Mort; yet Keneally sets in high relief the inheritance they represent, in their instinctive poetry and in the immensities of their own religion. Left to themselves, they would...