[Keneally] has impressed most readers and critics with his incredibly fecund invention and his impressively felicitous phrases in a dozen books written during the same number of years, yet Passenger must surely be his most complexly structured novel…. [But its complexity] may be an impediment to the achievement of its ultimate goal: the elucidation of the relationship of lovers and spouses and of these to "terminal love"—the fetus. Nonetheless, the skill with which events … are handled in both stream-of-consciousness and flashback techniques and made compatible with contemporary narration by a three-ounce fetus, "the reliquary of all the secrets" of his mother, is impressive.
The novelty of the point of view—the omniscience of the "passenger" in "the black duchy of the amnion"—is, of course, remarkable; but it is perhaps too daring, and at times the whole novel seems in jeopardy: caricature, irony and satire seem almost to intrude enough to dispel the tragic and frightening atmosphere and to turn a serious study into a comedy or fantasy. There are, to be sure, eccentric characters…. But the principal characters, with the sole exception of the journalist father ("a studied barbarian," "a man of immured fears"), are developed with care and compassion and provide genuine insights to the ramifications of love, hate, sex and parenthood.
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