SOURCE: A review of Jacko the Great Intruder, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 4, Autumn, 1994, pp. 879-80.

In the review below, King praises the cultural insights and narrative strategies of Jacko the Great Intrude.

Jacko the Great Intruder is the most complicated novel Thomas Keneally has written and the most exciting to read. While it will not get the same attention as Schindler's Ark or Confederates, it is probably even a better novel and would make an excellent film, provided that a way could be found to treat the many flashbacks, the changes in place, and the multiple strands of the narrative, which are essential to the story.

Jacko is one of Keneally's studies in the strange ways of goodness and evil in this world. A product of Australia's immense, largely uninhabited, remote Northern Territory, he is a contradictory mixture of ambition, energy, roughness, cunning, bad taste, good...