Fear of fleeing

Tucked into the pages of The Tyrant’s Novel, Thomas Keneally has slipped a short letter. Giving his reasons for writing the book and stating that he believes it to be the best he has yet produced, the letter is presumably intended for reviewers and booksellers, and it provides information in many ways crucial for readers, so crucial that it is hard to see why it was not included in a preface. The Tyrant’s Novel, Keneally explains, grew out of visits he made to the Villawood detention centre for asylum seekers outside Sydney, a ‘double-walled gulag’ behind razor wire and prison walls, where he felt outraged by the visible signs of Australia’s current policy of exclusion and extreme hostility towards refugees who land on their shores. This seems to him, he writes, ‘one of the great injustices of our history’. Writing the novel was a way of releasing the sense of fury and shame that overcame him.