Keneally, Thomas (Vol. 8) - Keneally, Thomas 1935–
Keneally, Thomas 1935–
Keneally, an Australian novelist who once studied for the priesthood, has shown a preoccupation with religious themes in his novels. He is appraised as a serious but flawed artist. Keneally's work appears to be influenced most by Evelyn Waugh and fellow Australian and Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White. (see also CLC, Vol. 5.)
[Bring Larks and Heroes] is passionate and fluent. The author's approach to language is aggressively determined. But the result is uneven and, for a medium-length novel, oddly diffuse…. Mr Keneally writes brilliantly but he does not organize his material well, either in the novel taken as a whole or in the smaller units of paragraph and sentence. His narrative shifts in and out of character, abruptly: at one moment a character is being lyrical or reflective or ironic, at the next the author is editorializing in the same or a different vein. The narrative also changes focus when there is an...
[The entire page is 2008 words long]
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