Keneally's 21st novel (Woman of the Inner Sea, 1993, etc.) - a
story based on his own grandfather's life - is another morally
weighted, if at times overdrawn, celebration of one man's dogged
battle with forces larger than himself in turn-of-the-century
Australia. Over the course of one hot summer, Irish immigrant and
storekeeper Tim Shea will find his new life in small-town Kempsey
nearly destroyed by a sequence of seemingly random events. As the
story begins, this thoughtful, imaginative man, who's saved enough
money to give up log-hauling and buy a general store - which he
runs with the help of pragmatic, outgoing wife Kitty - is troubled
by the death of a young woman at the hands of a local abortionist.
Since no one has identified her body, the woman's head has been
severed, preserved in a bottle, and given to a local policeman, who
travels with it around the countryside seeking information about
her identity. But only Tim, haunted by the sight of the head, seems
to care; and while his rescue of two children from an overturned
cart makes him temporarily a hero, his sense of alienation is
intensified by an unfamiliar mood in the town. When leading
citizens want to send troops to help Britain fight the Boers, Tim's
opposition soon leads to a boycott of his store. Like Job, he's
then visited by further disasters - the suicide of one of the
rescued children, a bubonic-plague quarantine, false accusations,
police entrapment, and imminent financial ruin. By autumn, though,
as personal confessions and distant victories change the town's
mood once again, Tim, who has his own prejudices to overcome, is at
peace: "For by then it was generally acknowledged that [he] wasn't
the dangerous fellow some had earlier claimed him to be." Rich in
period detail and local color, but, here, Keneally's penchant for
moral tub-thumping mars an otherwise absorbing story. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In turn-of-the-century Australia, Tim Shea supports his young
family by running a general store in a remote riverside town, where
he finds the same hypocrisy and snobbery which made him emigrate
from Ireland, and suffers a series of misfortunes which take him to
the brink of disaster. Capturing the spirit of the times, this is
the mesmerising tale of a flawed hero whose stubborn integrity is
nearly his undoing.
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