PASSENGER

by Thomas Keneally ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 27, 1979

Australian novelist Keneally (Victim of the Aurora) relishes challenge and doesn't like to repeat himself. Under richly sculpted, almost Elizabethan prose, he turns here to subtle parable. The fetus inside Sal Fitzgerald's womb is the ""passenger"" of the title, and the book's narrator too. This little fellow, equipped with genetic omniscience, knows all about his folks: he knows that his journalist dad Brian, adulterous and insecure, doesn't relish the baby's appearance and would prefer an abortion; and he knows that his novelist mom Sal, deeply hurt by this, is working on her new book, about a prison-ship abrim with the malefactors who originally settled Australia, in order to keep Brian's rejection out of her mind. Then a mysterious American financier, ""the Gnome,"" picks Sal out of the street one day to symbolize the mother he never knew; and when Brian, through a few plot pretzelings, has Sal committed to a mental institution, it's the Gnome who arranges her breakout and flight with him to Australia. Throughout the novel, there is much that is sheer enjoyment. The Donne-like musings of the fetus, for example. (""I rode the warm estuaries of Sal's blood and heard it sing in me. I adverted to the charming deftness of my inexorable kidneys and the crafty manufactury of my gut."") Or the bizarre auxiliary characters--like a London orthopedic surgeon who lethally injects his girlfriend's monkey (named Ran Singh) when he can't stand seeing the creature masturbate in his living room cage in front of guests. But, amid all this fecklessness and style, Keneally is subtly building an equation between fetuses and other kinds of prisoners, with all the gradations of guilt down the line. The result is charmingly serious--an elegant and clear book that is Keneally's best work in quite some time.

Pub Date: March 27, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION