- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 November 2000 22.48 GMT
Bettany's Book
Thomas Keneally
Sceptre £16.99, pp400
Buy it at BOL
'Do you think there is something wrong with our family? Is it in the heart, in the blood, in the brain?' So asks one member of the Bettany family to another. If there is anything wrong with the Bettanys it is perhaps that they suffer from a touching naivety. Jonathan Bettany, a nineteenth-century sheep farmer, and Primrose Bettany, a twentieth-century aid worker, battle in desperate situations in different parts of the world, and at different times, against their family's past and in a desperate hope for their own futures, to reach a kind of self-knowledge.
Jonathan struggles with himself and the terrain in New South Wales in what was known as 'The Limits of Location', Primrose's landscape and horrors are played out in Sudan, where on a mission she 'discovers' a famine which threatens 300,000 people, whilst above her disinterested satellites peer over the earth. Both Bettanys are outsiders and this is principally what they have in common, struggling in lands in which they fear they may not belong, both are innocent, well-meaning, stoical and, at times, foolish; both feel tremendous guilt for the suffering around them.
The Bettanys are not the only outsiders; there are many ticket-of-leave convicts, some from Ireland, some England, one half-Cherokee Indian, one half-Australian-half-Serbian ex-wife, an Italian POW, and while Jonathan's second wife is a part-Jewish convict from England, Primrose's lover is a Sudanese doctor who confesses: 'I'm disapproved of by some of my relatives. They think me something of a Westerner in disguise.'
The most interesting of these outsiders, though, is Felix Bettany, Jonathan's ward, a mulatto, whose aboriginal mother was impregnated and murdered by a white. Felix, an infant prodigy, learns to read Horace and become adept at geometry. There is something heartbreaking about this intelligent and earnest man, who, when discovered by Jonathan near to his mother's corpse, was unable to stop an exasperating grin distorting his face and who in his turn will commit murder. The tale of Felix, scholar and herdsman, neither white nor aboriginal, ends triumphantly in modern-day Singapore, where his descendant Sir Malik Bettany is the owner of a large bank.
Both narratives are dense and complicated, and sitting together the weight of information in Keneally's 600-page novel threatens to drown out the stories. At times it feels as if there are two novels uncomfortably welded together, the narratives so frequently interrupting each other. At other times they mirror each other wonderfully.
In the last 150 pages Keneally achieves an extraordinary feat by pulling this enormous work together, driven by the sudden urgency of their narratives. This is a difficult, sprawling, brave and ultimately rewarding novel.
