Bettany's Book
Thomas Keneally Sceptre, 400pp, £16.99
ISBN 0340610956
Thomas Keneally returns to familiar territory in Bettany's Book, his 22nd novel, which cuts back and forth between war-torn, famine- ridden Sudan and the wild west of early white Australian settlement.
Prim and Dimp, the novel's heroines, ring true as two outspoken Sydney sisters from an upper- middle-class, Anglo-Celtic family. They are orphaned when their parents die in a head-on collision, and both girls drift into doomed relationships with father figures. After the breakdown of her affair with a married man, Prim flees to Sudan, where she takes up a post with the Australian aid organisation Ausfam. Dimp, a successful film producer, marries an older businessman and abandons her career, but everything changes when she discovers the unpublished memoir of her great-grandfather, Bettany. It soon becomes evident that the fates of both sisters are closely bound up with the contents of Bettany's memoir. Dimp is inspired to make the notebook into a film, and her excitement about working again makes her realise her dissatisfaction with her marriage, which consequently falls apart. Poor Prim unwittingly echoes her great-grandparents' story in her love affair with a Sudanese doctor, whom she is eventually forced to abandon in order to return to her less troubled home country.
Quoted at length, the contents of Bettany's book initially make for a fascinating tale of white Australian origins, in which the often tragic relationships between Aboriginal communities and British settlers are deftly sketched. The naive, well-meaning Bettany is able neither to control the convicts who shepherd his enormous sheep and cattle station, nor to prevent the non-English-speaking tribe whose land his farm usurps from sheep spearing. As a mediator of conflict in a lawless place, Bettany is a failure. His one triumph is the half-Aboriginal, half-British child, Felix, whose life he saves and whom he has educated at the nearest school.
After a while, the historical sub-plot becomes wearing, and when Keneally adds Bettany's wife's letters to the memoir, the narrative flow all but grinds to a halt. Bettany's Book is not Keneally's greatest novel. While it has a strong political message and sense of justice, the book-within-a-book structure makes the story drag. Keneally would have done better to limit the novel's scope and to focus more closely on his two delightful heroines.
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