To conceive of the unendurable present as part of a story with a significant plot and uncertain outcome presupposed an outside world of shared meanings and moral continuity. It assumed human recognition; a day of reckoning. Because the Holocaust provides an objective correlative of Hell, outstripping the craziest nightmares and the cruellest dreams, the imagination is constantly challenged, and soon exhausted, by the effort of grasping it. As we know from government archives, Whitehall officials refused to credit what were described as 'the exaggerations … of these wailing Jews'. In the face of strained credulity and closed minds, new words are always needed. But any novelist who attempts to do justice to these facts comes up against the limitations of his own creative vision and energy, while feeling confined by the limitations of literature itself….

Schindler's Ark is based on the wartime recollections of 50 Jews, now living in Israel, America, Australia and Europe thanks to their timely transfer as slave labour to a factory where 'the soup was thick enough to sustain life'.

The joint testimony of these survivors has been tirelessly researched, skilfully assembled, scrupulously checked. The narrative sequence of flashbacks, clues and forecasts mingles suspense and shock with an immediacy unattainable through the settled hindsight of history. In delivering successive moments of experience, the novelist selectively defers the realisation of where they lead….

The strength and purpose of the book lies in what the victims have to tell us….

All the memories of Keneally's informants converge in the person of Oskar Schindler, and it is here that misgivings arise. The author portrays the hardware manufacturer not only as the centre of the action but as the natural heir to an apocalyptic destiny: a life-enhancing figure.

Keneally specifically denies any intention of canonising Schindler and claims to be on his guard against retrospective myths. But, by identifying Schindler with redemptive virtue, casting him in the balance against monstrous evil, citing the Talmud's 'Righteous of the Nations', Keneally turns chronicle into panegyric and elevates the Direktor to a dignity unsustained by evidence. Indeed, he repeats only grudgingly the allegations of former shopkeepers that the usurper beat them up….

The real Schindler owed his reputation for mercy and munificence to the company he kept. In the society of mass-murderers, the racketeer passes for a man of principle, distinguished only by the enormity of their crimes. These continue to defy analysis. 'Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?' Understandably at a loss, Keneally reverses the question and proposes, in effect, his own enigma: 'What lies behind this daring conscience, this exceptional compassion, this marvellous lack of race-hatred and blood-lust?' From here it is a short step to the mystic notion of divine grace working through the usual Catholic channels: a childlike hedonist, wayward prodigal, sensual adventurer and whisky-priest-equivalent is seized with a desire for souls 'in the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of the Jesus that hung on Emilie's wall'. Sceptics may regret this apotheosis as another defeat for rational enquiry.