The doubting priest

As Schindler’s Ark shows, Thomas Keneally is at his best bringing the past to life undaunted either by the importance of the events or by the famous names at the centre of them. Two of his other novels that lie to hand, A Family Madness and Gossip from the Forest, confirm that he wastes no time in throwing the reader in at the deep end and keeping him there. In the first one it’s Belorussia scrabbling to preserve its identity as Germany, Russia and Poland fight over it during the last war; in the other we eavesdrop on the private conversations between the French, British and German delegates when they meet in two railway carriages in a forest to discuss the armistice of 1918. In his new book we’re in Sydney in 1942, Singapore has fallen, bombs have hit Darwin – will we find ourselves on the bridge of the Japanese admiral’s flagship steaming towards the Coral Sea?

Nothing so lofty.