It is easy, Thomas Keneally remarks prefatorily, to chronicle the victory that evil generally scores over good, but "it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue". And Schindler's Ark is "'the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms". As if to palliate this artistic offence, Keneally hastens to assure us that "virtue" is not quite the right word for Schindler. True, he was generous to all his women and they all remained fond of him—but all in this context is scarcely a pointer to virtue. Keneally really needn't have worried. We are happy to hear of a triumph of good over evil once in a while, and in particular a pragmatic and unsubtle victory as distinct from the type called "moral". Given the circumstances, we would not want to hear about it if it were totally fictitious, of course, for that would only be the cruel, mocking triumph of a money-making lie. But we are assured that it is true. And Keneally's defensive or ironically deprecatory prolegomena are part of that assurance. A saintly Schindler we might find hard to take; and a saintly Schindler could never have deceived the Army, the SS, the ministries, into believing that—apart from an odd partiality for Jews, but then, some Jews were women, and they knew about old Oskar—he was one of them….
Schindler's Ark is not a great literary novel in the class of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, not the kind of book that Grass or Böll might have created out of similar material. It is nearer to the documentary-style adventure stories of Hans Hellmut Kirst (Officer Factory, The Night of the Generals), though less of an "entertainment", far more powerful and more significant in its theme. For better or for worse, symbolic overtones are rarely to be detected, and individual characters have little depth or definition. Schindler himself, while we follow his antics with greater fear and trembling than the Scarlet Pimpernel could ever command, remains an uncertain figure. Was he moved by compassion, by disgust with the Nazi regime? By (to begin with, at least) a capitalist's natural urge to do business freely? Was he a blend of gambler, sentimentalist and anarchist? Or motivated by a stubborn determination to keep his word to "his" Jews and preserve his honour as a good sport, a determination strengthened by three arrests and interrogations? Was it a zest for excitement, compensating for the flatness of life with an ascetic (though morally admirable) wife?…
