FICTION
The Dickens Boy
Tom Keneally
Vintage, $32.99
Tom Keneally has been writing since time began, or so it seems. His enormous output includes more than 30 novels. Yet his latest, The Dickens Boy, does not feel like the work of an old man and certainly not of a writer who has no interest in learning more about his craft. It is energetic, even exuberant. It is in love with the abundance of life it negotiates.
At the same time, Keneally is still working to find the right way to tell an intricate story, one that brings together colonial Australia and the Indigenous culture it pretended did not exist. It speaks of the way pain can move across hemispheres. It unpacks the problems of class and education. It ponders the burden of being the youngest son of the most famous man in the world and a mother that famous man used badly.
Tom Keneally loves Charles Dickens, but his love is certainly not blind.Credit:Louie Douvis
There are elements of the picaresque in the landscape of this book; it includes vivid tales that shimmer for short time and then are gone. Yet one of its attractions is the way Keneally shapes his material, never assuming that, so far into a career, he has mastered the form. Would that we could all reach the middle of our ninth decade with eyes as open in wonder.
The Dickens boy of the title is the youngest of Charles Dickens’ 10 children: Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, better known as Plorn. Dickens was a restless father, to say the least, and dispatched his children to the ends of his imagination. He sent two to Australia. Alfred, seven years older than Plorn arrived in 1865. Plorn himself had not yet turned 16 when he came in 1868.
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Dickens said memorably of his youngest that he was ‘‘born without a groove’’, meaning he lacked substance and direction. He may well have said this to divert his own attention from the manner in which his separation from his wife, Catherine, made a disturbing impact on Plorn. He sent him across the world with a New Testament, a few tart words of advice and very little confidence that the boy would succeed.
In The Dickens Boy, Plorn is nothing like the worthless nobody his father presents. Here he is more than willing to work hard and to apply his mind to untangling the workings of colonial society. He is a bit like Nicholas Nickleby: an earnest young man surrounded by nastiness on the one hand and eccentricity on the other.
Plorn finds work on sheep stations in the vicinity of the Darling, places where long journeys on horseback don’t seem to get you very far. He meets a man called Dandy who hangs himself rather than answer a summons to return to the House of Lords to take up his peerage. He encounters a monk called Father Clarisse who radically tries to bridge Western and Indigenous spiritualities. A convicted forger called Heatherly helps him in a difficult situation. All these meetings – there are many – create a colourful tapestry.
When at last Plorn manages to catch up with Alfred, they muse on the curious relationship their celebrated father had with Australia, in spite of never visiting the place. Plorn avows that he has not read Dickens’ books. This makes him a rarity in a land where even poorly educated boundary riders gorge themselves on Dickens like a drug. He was ‘‘to many of them like a pontiff of the universal human heart’’. He is their happy place, their escape. So Plorn is treated with considerable deference, somewhat to his frustration. He is keen to get out from under the shadow of a father who disparaged him.
Alfred consoles his brother that ‘‘all love is the love of imperfect people’’. He itemises the long list of characters that their father disposed of to Australia: Micawber, Little Em’ly, Uncle Peggotty. He could have added Uriah Heep. The alternative in his narratives was death.
Their ‘‘guvnor’’ was a god for whom Australia was ‘‘the pit at the end of the world you toss useless folk in’’. Both young men feel the pain of this. But for Plorn, Australia becomes as good a place as any in which to establish a sense of his own identity, a quest he shares with many others in this book. His fate will not be determined by the plot his father created for him.
It is a pleasure to see any person establish themselves regardless of whose son they are. Keneally enjoys this too. He clearly loves Charles Dickens, but his love is far from blind.
Michael McGirr is the author of Books That Saved my Life (Text).
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