Two new books by the indefatigable Thomas Keneally are being published in the space of four weeks.
Luke Slattery listens August 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian

THE glass doors at Random House headquarters in North Sydney slide apart to reveal a momentarily surprised Tom Keneally and his publisher Meredith Curnow.
Wide-eyed, lips parted, silenced by mutual curiosity, they look towards me like a couple out of Vermeer or de Hooch, frozen perfectly in time and place. Until, that is, Keneally starts talking. And doesn't stop.
It is, of course, his job to talk. I've come to discuss Keneally's two new books -- a work of historical fiction, The People's Train, published by Random House and out on Monday, and one of popular history, Australians, published by Allen &Unwin and in the shops in just four weeks -- and he is wonderfully exuberant about both. Keneally has always been, at heart, a bravura storyteller, and a passion for telling animates the man as much as it does his work.
Experience and imagination are the European novel's twin wellsprings. Keneally supplements these with a taste for the archives, a terrier-like talent for sniffing out the documentary trail. His most acclaimed novels -- Schindler's Ark, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Bring Larks and Heroes -- are all interweavings of history and fiction.
"I'm a cheap drunk," he confesses, "and it takes very little history to set me off."
Dressed in a brown suede bomber jacket and dark blue trousers, shod in a pair of jogging shoes, his pate protected by a crumpled sports cap and his chin cupped by a beard that puts one in mind of a beatnik leprechaun, Keneally looks marvellously unselfconscious. There is really no one like him in the world of Australian literature. He is very much his own creation.

Invited to discuss the new novel, he retails his story of an exile from Tsarist Russia moonlighting in early 20th century Brisbane with such brio that eventually he is forced to halt himself. He has not so much lost the plot as given it away. "I've just revealed the denouement of the whole bloody book," he says with a gravelly laugh. "Oh well, I've never believed in the creation of false suspense. It's how you tell it that counts."
The People's Train is Keneally's fictionalisation of a slice from the documented life of wandering Bolshevik Artem Sergeiev, who washed up in Australia in 1911 after escaping from a Tsarist prison and returned later to fight in the October Revolution. Sergeiev morphs in Keneally's hands into Artem Samsurov, whose memoir the book purports to be.
The genre demands from Keneally a subtle act of literary ventriloquism, for he must craft a narrative voice that bears the inflections of a Russian emigre, the emotional shadings of an exiled Bolshevik's inner life, and some authentic timbre of the time.
"I've fictionalised Sergeiev but at the same time I've followed some of the things that actually happened to him," Keneally explains. "That's the great thing about the novel form. You can take from history only the bits and pieces you want to use." The historical spade work was done for the novelist by Queensland academics Tom Poole and Eric Fried and published in 1985 as a journal article, "Artem, a Bolshevik in Brisbane". The debt, he is quick to point out, is acknowledged in the book.
The second half of The People's Train is narrated by a larrikin left-wing Brisbane journalist named Paddy Dykes, and this character is an entirely fictional creation. An "accidental Russian", Dykes describes his long journey with Artem back to Russia, plunging the reader into the heart of the Bolshevik revolution. "It was a time," Keneally offers, almost apologetically, "when many Australians of the working class felt that to be a communist was to be on the side of the angels. It was still a dream. They had seen nothing of Lenin in power; knew nothing of the deranged Joseph Stalin." The novel's readers, on the other hand, do get a glimpse of Lenin, or Vladimir Ilich, and a menacing pock-marked roue named Koba who is, of course, Stalin: man of steel.


Read the full long piece at The Australian online.


And here is the footnote from the end of the article:
The People's Train is reviewed in these pages next week.
Australians is published by Allen&Unwin on September 1.
It will be reviewed in these pages on August 27.
Tom Keneally will be a guest at this year's Melbourne (August 21-30) and Brisbane (September 9-13) writers festivals.