BOOK REVIEW: PETER CUNNINGHAMreviews The People's TrainBy Thomas Keneally Sceptre; 408pp; £17.99
THOMAS KENEALLY is a busy writer. Since 1964 when he began his writing career, he has by my calculation written 28 novels, eight books of non-fiction and two books for children. That’s a new book every 14 months for 45 years, which is some going.
Keneally's industrious approach normally involves an unusual perspective on a well- known historical event. His best- known book, Schindler's Ark(1982; winner of the Booker Prize and made into the film Schindler's List), for example, focused on the until then little-known heroism of a German businessman who rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazi death camps.
The People's Trainbegins in Brisbane in 1911 and is told by Artem Samsurov, an escapee from tsarist Russia, a fictional character "based on a true story".
Big and genial, Artem works as a labourer, but through his contacts with other exiled Russians begins a newspaper which advances the cause of the working man. Artem soon falls foul of the authorities who are out to get the “red bastards”, goes to jail, and falls in love with a female lawyer whose estranged husband is a lawyer of distinction.
Artem is a glamorous catch for the left-leaning Brisbane set. He relates for their benefit his former life in Russia, including his connections with Lenin, whose protege he is. Artem’s account of his flight from a tsarist labour camp to Australia, via Japan, is full of well-worked tension and exotic period detail.
In 1917, Artem returns to Russia in the company of Paddy Dykes, an Aussie miner and journalist who now takes up the story. Russia is in ferment, with Lenin and Stalin opposed to the policies of the prime minister of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky.
Dykes is in this way dropped into the centre of one of the most important periods of history, a veritable Aussie fly on the wall. By virtue of Artem’s patronage, he virtually becomes a Red Guard, and in October 1917 participates in the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), seat of the provisional government.
The ferment at the heart of the October revolution that led to the Russian civil war and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922 is captured with great skill.
Keneally's research is convincing and his ability to gradually win over a reader's trust is impressive. The People's Trainchugs along, picking up momentum as it goes, stopping at tiny, previously unconsidered stations and eventually barrels into the pivotal terminus of the Winter Palace.
There is a problem, however. Keneally has chosen to dispense entirely with conventional forms of presentation in regard to dialogue. Whereas most writers present dialogue between inverted commas, and some introduce dialogue with a hyphen, Keneally has removed all such conventions in this novel. The result is a challenge to the reader.
Whereas one can become immersed in a novel by, for example, Portuguese writer José Saramago, in which all conventional punctuation has been removed to facilitate an unbroken stream of consciousness, Keneally is not that kind of writer. I accept that the attentive reader should be able to distinguish the well- crafted spoken voice from the narrative, but the degree of concentration needed to do so in this case took away much of the pleasure of an otherwise engaging story set in a fascinating period of history.
Peter Cunningham is a novelist. The Sea and the Silence, his most recent novel, is published by New Island