Early Novels
Keneally's early works tend to reflect his interests in spiritual matters and contemporary social issues. In the allegorical novel A Dutiful Daughter (1971), which Garry Wills of the New York Times Book Review called "an extraordinary book in every way," Keneally drew a nightmarish portrait of a close-knit family coping with the sudden and incomprehensible transformation of the parents into creatures half-cow and half-human. While the college-age son begins to turn away from his extraordinary family situation, his sister becomes increasingly defined by it. Angela Carter, in the New York Times Book Review, described the novel as a "spirited expressionist performance" that displayed "a diabolical ingenuity." Muriel Haynes, in the Saturday Review found the work "modeled loosely on the Christian legend of redemption" and judged it "the boldest expression yet of [Keneally's] war against moribund doctrine and its crippling of living religious faith."
Racism and violence, two social issues that figure prominently in many of Keneally's works, are closely examined in his acclaimed early work The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972). In the novel Keneally depicted an incident that occurred in New South Wales in 1900 in which a mixed-race aborigine exploded into a murderous rage following persistent racist treatment by white settlers.
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