THE SURVIVOR

by Thomas Keneally ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1970

This is the fifth of Mr. Keneally's interesting, interior dramas; he's an Australian writer of spare originality and the subliminal (finally externalized) search here is slowed down only by the occasional difficulties of his style (""No dithering dream of subfuse colour and inchoate event""). Once attuned, one follows with a definite urgency the circular itinerary of Alec Ramsey, now 62, and what his pragmatic wife Ella calls his ""betrayal obsessions."" Forty years earlier he had made a journey to Antarctica with a man called Leeming who contended that ""Antarctica (was the) sacrament of the absolute."" There were no absolutes for Ramsey, haunted not only by an earlier adultery with Leeming's wife but also by the circumstances of his death: he had left Leeming on the ice ""past help, past pain"" but still alive. Now in the present Leeming's body has been discovered and it pitches Ramsey right back into his ""one central lunacy,"" ravaged by the shards of the old guilts and rancors and terrors. He returns to the site and. . . but before that there have been other inquiries into the validity of cold courage, or was it only a selfish form of self-testing which ended in a gratuitous rather than meritorious death? As such the novel exploratory as well as expiatory, retains a firm hold on the reader and there's no denying its fierce and fateful power.

Pub Date: March 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION