Although the publishers describe [A Victim of the Aurora] as 'Thomas Keneally's first detective story', it effectively marks the demise of that debased and flatulent genre…. It is set at the close of the sticky Edwardian era and so, theoretically, it might be described just as easily as an historical novel—but, like all of Keneally's work it actually subverts European history … by bringing to it alien and more vigorous perceptions…. In Keneally's hands the historical novel is redeemed as the raw materials of the past are turned into a kind of fable.

These blinding metaphysical matters don't mean that Keneally is forgetful of technical considerations. He astutely aligns the imaginative content of historical fiction with the pert structure of the detective thriller, and by conflating them creates a new thing. (p. 19)

But this is not a weak-kneed or vapidly ironic handling of the techniques of English fiction…. Thomas Keneally is a powerful and subtle writer, whose simplicity of style must never be confused with simplicity of meaning. He actually uses the Polar Expedition as a way of breaking several historical codes, as the Edwardian age vanishes as mysteriously as the aurora itself….

The book is full … of extraordinary images and implications. In all of Thomas Keneally's work there is an attempt at what I have called the subversion of received European history by rendering it both more exactly—his sense of place is remarkable—and more luridly. It is part of the strange darkness of the Australian imagination. The colour, the vivid imaginings, the rhetorical simplicity of his evocation of the past have to do with Keneally's own manner, but also with a quality in Australian writing: its bleakness and its blank pessimism…. (p. 20)