At first sight, the donnée of Thomas Keneally's new novel [Passenger] lies in its narrator, a foetus…. 'The rose or weed of knowledge opened in my hand, and I, as it were, fingered all its petals.'…

This sounds like science fiction, but in the event the book is much farther from that genre than was Thomas Keneally's earlier novel, A Dutiful Daughter, which was also much more horrific. There, children had to cope with parents who turned into physical monsters; and the son declared that moral blindness towards 'freaks' derives from 'our poisonous concept of what's natural'. Here, a foetus has to cope with a mildly barbarian father and his concept of what is convenient to him: the natural is now at risk. But the privileged foetus simply serves as the novelist's eye, a necessary convention, and—more importantly—as an essentially conventional character in...