Thomas Keneally has always aimed at high seriousness. His works reveal an epic ambition, attempting to reconcile with domestic reality the consciousness of some larger life beyond the self. Unlike many Australian writers, he has been less concerned to work out a personal myth than to come to terms with a more general sense of the self as Australian, suspended between belonging and alienation, between the realities of an Australia which is, in culture, English-speaking, and of, on the other hand, an Australia which is, in geographic fact, Asian and alien, barbarous, splendid and unanswerably, its own place. For this reason he has always been a writer who mattered, even when he is writing too much too quickly or when, as in the novels since The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, he no longer seems directly concerned with Australia or Australians. The abiding concerns and, above all, the sense of reality which he derives from his sense of himself as an Australian remain. Indeed, these later novels seem to be more, not less, filled with the sense of alienation, of dislocated vision which he characterises as typical of Australians, the more so because as the physical environment itself has disappeared the peculiar menace it embodies grows stronger.
Certainly, in Keneally's own work, the humane and artistic sense has always been under pressure. His first novel, The Fear, describes a childhood beset not only by a sense of the land as a sacred place of mingled fear and attraction, but also by monstrous ideologies, Communism and Catholicism, competing for the boy's allegiance. In the novels which followed, the struggle continues between savagery and humane values and recently—since The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, in which some sense of humanity, however beleaguered, still prevailed—the savagery seems to have won. This is a new departure. The fight seems to have gone out of his characters: the note now is surrender. In Blood Red, Sister Rose and Gossip From the Forest, for example, the protagonists, Joan of Arc and Matthias Erzeberger, the German plenipotentiary sent to make the Armistice of 1918, are mere victims. They go, as one of the German officers remarks of Erzeberger, like the 'bull to be pole-axed'. Nor is there any real tragic sense to this destruction. Brute necessity prevails. Self-consciousness is at a minimum in these characters; what remains and pervades their stories is the melancholy consciousness which takes a grim pleasure in putting an end to illusions of happiness and even more significantly, to the search for human justice.
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