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A review by daja57
The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally
4.0
The fictionalised biography of Edward 'Plorn' Dickens, son of the famous novelist. Plorn, an academically challenged sixteen-year-old who has never read his father's books, is sent to Australia to become a sheep-rancher. We learn a great deal about the frontier Australia of the day, about sheep-farming and the newly-dispossessed aborigines, and the logistical and social contexts of farming a remote homestead. Plorn's experiences of love and loss, of kindness and hatred and danger, and his gradual understanding of sex and its relation to the scandalous divisions between his mother and father, help him to grow up.
This is a slow-paced book, gently told. The essential themes are 'coming of age' and the difficulties of being a normal son of a famous father. But the problem with 'true' stories is that some events happen and then other ones do, without the unification imposed by a nove's structure. For example, what promises to be a major character dies quite early in the narrative and another fades out. Then other characters have to arrive to carry the story. And some situations, as in real life, never get fully resolved. While this adds verisimilitude, it makes the book less of a page-turner. Certainly I was less motivated to read it than by Keneally's most famous book 'Schindler's Ark', the bionovel on which 'Schindler's List' was based (the book is better because it really explores the shadowy fringes of heroism).
This is a slow-paced book, gently told. The essential themes are 'coming of age' and the difficulties of being a normal son of a famous father. But the problem with 'true' stories is that some events happen and then other ones do, without the unification imposed by a nove's structure. For example, what promises to be a major character dies quite early in the narrative and another fades out. Then other characters have to arrive to carry the story. And some situations, as in real life, never get fully resolved. While this adds verisimilitude, it makes the book less of a page-turner. Certainly I was less motivated to read it than by Keneally's most famous book 'Schindler's Ark', the bionovel on which 'Schindler's List' was based (the book is better because it really explores the shadowy fringes of heroism).