[In Passenger, Thomas Keneally] has written the first novel to have its narrator and protagonist in utero throughout: the child in the womb of Sal Fitzgerald. With paradoxical omniscience he tells us all that happens to him, his begetters, and those around him, from the awakening of his awareness in the earliest days of Sal's pregnancy to full term. (p. ii)

This powerfully imagined device works wonderfully well, and we are led at once into a web of conflicts and ambivalences. Irish Sal, a novelist, accepts and cherishes the pregnancy. Brian [the father], Australian born, descendant of an eighteenth-century Irish rebel deported to Australia, is a journalist, an incorrigible womanizer, and is terrified at the idea of parenthood. He confesses to acute "fear of the unborn." From the start he wants this pregnancy terminated.

For the passenger and the reader a tremendous suspense builds up over the safety...