By Bron Sibree for The Sunday Times
Shame and the Captives
Thomas Keneally (Hodder & Stoughton)
****
Give him half a chance and Tom Keneally will attribute his latest and thirty-third novel, Shame and the Captives, to “a surge of recklessness.” It’s true that in a writing career that now spans 50 years, the septuagenarian novelist is fabled as much for his self-confessed impetuous streak as he is for writing more than 50 books all told. “Without recklessness,” says Keneally, who has garnered numerous prestigious awards including a Man Booker prize, “writers would never do anything.”
But his recklessness goes only part way to explaining the genesis of Shame and the Captives, which is a fictional re-imagining of one of the bloodiest prison episodes of World War 2. Keneally was nine years old in 1944, when more than 500 Japanese prisoners of war escaped from an Australian camp in the New South Wales town of Cowra. Four Australians and more than 200 Japanese soldiers were killed, and in the manhunt that ensued, the rest were eventually recaptured and re-interned. Keneally vividly recalls the fear the breakout induced. “I had an aunt who lived in a nearby hamlet who slept with an axe – of course my father said, ‘if I was the axe I would have complained’ – but the idea of a woman sleeping with an axe had a very powerful effect on my all-too-easily-provoked imagination.”
He first wrote about the breakout in 1965, in his second novel, The Fear, which he now dismisses as merely “technically appalling.” But his indefatigable imagination was provoked all over again three years ago when he visited Cowra. “I wanted to do it properly and write it from the point of view of the present, where the prisoners are not grotesques. When I was a kid, we thought they were after us and in fact they were after something entirely other. When I found out that they were after self-exoneration, expiation, I was fascinated by that. A lot of the Japanese POWS were scared but they felt they should go along with the motion for self-destruction, for an honourable death. But I was interested in the fact that you can condition young men to believe anything.”
There’s no denying the novel also subtly sheets home the unfathomable emotional complexities for individuals trapped in a time when, as Keneally writes, ‘an entire ocean and all its archipelagos had been captured by a cult of death.’ But for Keneally, who is quick to own up to his own experience of conditioning as a young man studying for the priesthood, the notion of influence is endlessly fascinating, and resonates with events in contemporary times. “The great crimes of the 20th and 21st century have been carried out by young men, whom, if you met them, you’d think, ‘What a nice fellow’ – and I certainly wanted to write about the fact that you can make them do anything. Not that it won’t haunt them later. But I also think conditioning is going on now. Australians are kindly people, but I think we are being conditioned to take certain attitudes towards asylum seekers, and sadly that conditioning works, on all of us.”
It’s why he has also co-edited a new volume of writings on asylum seekers, A Country too Far. “We wanted to put a human face on the asylum seeker in a world where there are about 50 million displaced people and about 8 million official refugees.” In it he writes of ‘a more honourable time’ in history “when Australians were part of an international effort to locate 8 million displaced people after WW2 and took in 170,000. “It didn’t sink Australia, it enriched Australia. Simply punishing people very badly who have not committed a crime under international law, for taking the risk of getting here,” he says, “is not going to solve their problems or ours.” – @BronSibree
Thomas Keneally will be appearing at the Franschhoek Literary Festival.
Book details
- Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally
EAN: 9781444781281
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