In the following essay, Hollington discusses Keneally's novel as a predominantly Australian work, "owing more to the mythology of the bush than to that of central Europe."
The title of Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize winning text, with its overt Old Testament reference, may indicate that this book offers itself, as a consenting adult, to the kind of critical reading in which Christianity gets a large and sympathetic hearing. Keneally's Schindler, the Sudetan German who saved the lives of thousands of Jews in Poland between 1939 and 1945 is, like Noah, the 'one just man' of the dark and evil times of Nazi Germany—a type of Christ harrowing hell (Auschwitz, Gröss-Rosen, Plasów) to redeem the souls of the otherwise damned. Such a reading might construe him as a kind of Graham Greene hero, paradoxically bringing forth good.....
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