A Victim of the Aurora, a detective story concerned with homosexuality on a polar expedition, demonstrates that the author is wholly out of his métier, raises serious questions about his literary capacity and denies most assuredly the publisher's claim that "Keneally has never written with greater eloquence or authority." In all essential elements the novel suggests carelessness or decline in construction and composition: characterization is sketchy and ineffectual; description is fitful, inadequate and lacking in precision or detail; language is repetitive, void of the customary flashes of beauty and poetry; plot is contrived, often unexplained and unconvincing because too contrived. The elements of the baroque that marked some of the author's earlier work reappear, as do several attempts at pretentiousness, such as a torturous quasi-psychological analysis of the Hamlet-like motivation of one of the characters.
The book is marred by numerous insertions of "filler" that Keneally presumably feels is unknown to his readers, by inadvertent shifts from British to American usage … and inaccurate cultural information that should provide plausibility. He suggests that before World War II British upper-class speech and behavior were unknown to the lower classes…. A Victim of the Aurora is a great disappointment, a sad decline from the artistry of Bring Larks and Heroes and Jimmie Blacksmith.
Alan L. McLeod, "Australia: 'A Victim of the Aurora'," in World Literature Today (copyright 1978 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 52, No. 4, Autumn, 1978, p. 690.
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