In the following essay, Cantrell traces the development of Keneally's novels through Bring Larks and Heroes.

In the essay below, Petersson investigates the parallels between Keneally's use of German imagery and the Australian cultural experience, correlating German traits to similar Australian values.

In the following essay, Hospital characterizes Keneally's protagonists as movern-day Jeremiahs, interspersing her analysis with an interview of Keneally, in which he discusses political aspects of religion and authobiographical elements of his writings.

In the following essay, English examines the subjective bases of the authorial consciousness that informs Keneally's novels, emphasizing specifically the textual connections between his own biography, his sense of history, and other written texts..

In the essay below, Pierce examines the motives of Keneally's detractors.

In the following review, Hospital emphasizes the millennial tone of A River Town, comparing the novel's themes on Australia in 1900 to comtemporary Australian experience.

In the following essay, Monk traces the progress of Halloren's apotheosis in Bring Larks and Heroes as a function of the narrative's inversion of conventional and pastoral tropes, related to characters, settings, and moral tone.

In the following essay, Ryan compares the authorial perspectives of Schindler's List, Günter Grass's Show Your Tongue, and Marguerite Duras's The Lover, to account for the ways their national identities influence their attitudes toward multicultural relations.

In the following interview, Keneally discusses the function of history in his fiction, the significance of his non-Australian settings, and his fictional use of historical facts.

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 Australi...

In the following review, Schaeffer outlines the plot and themes of Woman of the Inner Sea.

In the review below, Conrad finds the arguments and production values of Memoirs from a Young Republic "shockingly amateurish.".

In the following review, McCulloughassesses the narrative style of A River Town.

In the following review, Swickfaults The Place Where Souls are Born for its "confused mosiac" of Native American history and for Keneally's dependence on secondary sources.

In the following review of Woman of the Inner Sea, Rifkind focuses on the characterization of the book's heroine.

[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, a...

War, like the sea is slow to give up its dead; any verdict on a novel of war so immediately overwhelming as Thomas Keneally's ['Confederates'] should similarly be the slow fruit of rumination. Since there is no such breathing space for the reviewer, one is tempted to risk the opinion that this author has excelled the achievement of his 'Gossip from the Forest' and 'Season in Purgatory' and that 'Confederates' deserves some comparison with the tw...

History intimidates fiction. It threatens the play of the imagination by confronting it with unavoidable facts, and obtrudes actual incidents upon provocative inventions. But history, of course, also aids and abets fiction. It encourages a proper attention to detail and character by insisting that, in spite of its enormous scale, it is in reality a mosaic of related fragments and individuals. Thomas Keneally is well aware of this, but it does not stop him, in his new novel Confederates, wandering too freely...

[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 …...

Although the publishers describe [A Victim of the Aurora] as 'Thomas Keneally's first detective story', it effectively marks the demise of that debased and flatulent genre…. It is set at the close of the sticky Edwardian era and so, theoretically, it might be described just as easily as an historical novel—but, like all of Keneally's work it actually subverts European history … by bringing to it alien and more vigorous perceptions…. In Keneally'...

In the course of doing research for a World War I film script, the Australian Thomas Keneally was, fortunately for novel readers, sidetracked into an exhaustive study of the members of the Armistice Team. The result of his effort is Gossip from the Forest, a gripping evocation of the tensions of the time and of the men who made the Armistice…. All of the shortsighted military arrogance in the story arouses mainly disgust in the reader. What the politicians and military officers did there at Compi�...

"Confederates" is exceptional in the Keneally corpus for its American—namely, Civil War—setting, yet typical of an author who has continually challenged his abilities with diverse material…. "Confederates" reaffirms Mr. Keneally's mastery of narrative voice…. With "Confederates,"… it is almost necessary to remind oneself that the author is Australian, so naturally, intrinsically Southern is the narrative voice. Considering t...

Keneally's newest narrator [in Passenger] is a foetus, a pugnacious little fellow who's been jolted into omniscience by a hologram taken to establish his sex. As the laser beams 'pepper up his cortex,' lovely Sal Fitzgerald's passenger becomes 'arrantly awake' to his family history, his father's infidelities, and the threats to his own existence…. Passenger is a witty variant on the picaresque tradition, jauntily sustained, and versatile, in tha...

At first sight, the donnée of Thomas Keneally's new novel [Passenger] lies in its narrator, a foetus…. 'The rose or weed of knowledge opened in my hand, and I, as it were, fingered all its petals.'… This sounds like science fiction, but in the event the book is much farther from that genre than was Thomas Keneally's earlier novel, A Dutiful Daughter, which was also much more horrific. There, children had to cope with parents who turned into physical monsters;...

Thomas Keneally's fictions are widely travelled: medieval Normandy, an 18th-century penal colony in the South Pacific, France in 1918, the Antarctic (twice)—you name it, they've been there. Passenger happens in the most exotic place of all: 'I sat in the black duchy of the amnion. Through the blood vessels of the placenta I took bounties from my mother's body—oxygens, minerals, carbohydrates.' This is no ordinary pregnancy:… [the foetus-narrator] has a...

The early years of this century were the heroic years of Antarctic exploration and it is in this period that A Victim of the Aurora is set. The pity is that, unreal though the novel is, it defiles the historical events and characters from which it derives. Thomas Keneally has chosen to use clearly recognizable episodes from the past as a backdrop for homosexuality, murder, execution and other unworthy practices and qualities ascribed to characters who are imaginary, yet many of whom would seem easily identi...

I confess to finding the randy villain of that uterine jest [Passenger] a more sharply conceived and executed figure than any of those who toil through the mud and blood of the North Virginian Army [in Confederates] as it desperately seeks through 1862 to bring the British Government, politically, into the war. Confederates, in short, is Keneally's American Civil War Novel. He has done his reading thoroughly, listed the main sources at the end, made a craftsmanlike fiction out of them, and moved on t...

There is no more diligent soothsayer than Thomas Keneally, forever poking about among the entrails of the European past for some clue, previously missed, to the development of a present that no rational seer before about 1950 could have predicted. His last three books have drawn attention to significant stages in the attenuation of the old European chivalric virtues, and their replacement by bloodthirst, vengeful greed, and the tyranny of the majority. Now, in A Victim of the Aurora, he focuses on two relat...

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 i...

You can read [Victim of the Aurora] on several levels, all of them entertaining and provocative. It is an adventure story, the tale of an expedition to Antarctica in the years just before World War I. It is a mystery in the classic British style, complete with a murder most foul, a large cast of plausible suspects, and a narrator who fits together all the pieces of the puzzle. And it is a thoughtful novel about the corruption of innocence, the unending burden of guilt, and the perpetuation of official decei...

The narrator of Thomas Keneally's Passenger hasn't been born yet and at certain points in the course of the story it begins to look doubtful whether he ever will be…. The tone, suitable to an unborn narrator, is one of innocent cynicism. The foetus, absorbing human knowledge with one pulsation of the umbilicus, finds it all acceptable but for the squalid fact of birth and views the antics of those unlucky enough to have left the womb with a high-flown pity tempered by the horrid knowled...

Thomas Keneally is frequently spoken of as "the other" major Australian novelist. But in the present instance comparison is unfair. "Season in Purgatory" … is entertainment with only intermittent and infelicitous pretensions to anything more. (p. 132) [One] asks oneself just why Mr. Keneally, whose previous novels show an oddly costive but unmistakable stylishness and adultness, should turn out this purple tripe. He is obsessed by the sensual texture of history, by the imm...

"Passenger" is a wonderfully poised novel. It rattles along at great speed without ever missing out on the telling, piquantly humorous detail. Mr. Keneally has taken on a bold range of subjects—parenthood, sexuality, psychiatry—and serves them up with a rare, Nabokovian verve that yet manages to sound the depths. His novel should be read for the sheer jeu d'esprit of it, although "Passenger" is more than fun. Daphne Merkin, "Parents and Th...