Thomas Keneally has always aimed at high seriousness. His works reveal an epic ambition, attempting to reconcile with domestic reality the consciousness of some larger life beyond the self. Unlike many Australian writers, he has been less concerned to work out a personal myth than to come to terms with a more general sense of the self as Australian, suspended between belonging and alienation, between the realities of an Australia which is, in culture, English-speaking, and of, on the other hand, an Australia which is, in geographic fact, Asian and alien, barbarous, splendid and unanswerably, its own place. For this reason he has always been a writer who mattered, even when he is writing too much too quickly or when, as in the novels since The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, he no longer seems directly concerned with Australia or Australians. The abiding concerns and, above all, the sense...