Thomas Keneally: A national disgrace

It is not the most tactful week for a British magazine to interview Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The prolific writer--who has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winning it in 1982 with his novel Schindler's Ark--is also, it turns out, a former rugby coach; he was at the final of the Rugby World Cup to see his national team defeated.

"It was a night of fine feeling," he says philosophically, over the phone from his home in Sydney. "The most astonishing thing was that there were English and Aussies embracing; I got many a kiss from lively English roses by saying, 'Good on you poms, you won it fair and square.'"

Jokingly, Keneally claims that Australia's sporting defeat was just the natural consequence of the moral decay of the country engendered by its attitude to asylum seekers, the subject of his latest book.

The Tyrant's Novel (Sceptre, 2nd February 2004, h/b, £16.99, 0340825251) is a special piece of work for the author, he says; it is an urgently political book, inspired by Keneally's regular visits to the inmates of Australia's ill-famed detention centres.

Written with the quality of an Orwellian fable in mind, The Tyrant's Novel narrates the life story of an asylum seeker who has reached Australia after fleeing an unnamed Middle Eastern country, fairly readily identifiable as Iraq. "Alan"--Keneally has chosen to use European names throughout--tells of how, in his home country, he was a writer with a high literary reputation, married to a beautiful and principled actress, Sarah.

In his narrative, Sarah's sudden death from a brain aneurism plunges Alan into a period of deep grief, during which he buries the manuscript of his newly completed novel in her grave as a tribute to all that he learned from her. But another source of trouble soon follows: the Overguard military police arrive in a shiny limousine to take him off to meet his country's ruler, the insanely murderous Great Uncle. Great Uncle, it transpires, has a job for Alan: to ghostwrite a propagandist novel in one month, to be published by an American publishing house under Great Uncle's name for the tyrant's greater glory.

With the clear understanding that failure to deliver means death, Alan's dilemma is twofold: must he betray all integrity to serve Great Uncle's ends, and can he conceivably write the book in a mere four weeks anyway? As he squanders the precious days before his deadline on alcohol, grief and uncertainty, the pull of Alan's dilemma on the reader--particularly with the knowledge that there is an already finished novel lying buried in the sanctum that is Sarah's grave--is close to that of a thriller.

Keneally's views on the asylum issue in Australia are so strong that he peppers his interview with The Bookseller with broad profanities--at one point robustly characterising the Australian prime minister John Howard as a "dingo fuckwit"--while apologising for his bad language with a hearty guffaw.

He explains that it was a sense of outrage over what was going on in his own country that prompted his book. "To get all the way to Australia, the asylum seeker has to exercise craft and courage and indomitability, and is fleeing an unsatisfactory regime--and that is what Australia was always supposed to be for. I am an old Labour voter, but the Labour Party has not stood up for these people, and they have seen the refugees as a security problem rather than a humanitarian problem. Major parties dare not mention any sympathy for the detainees, including the children--Australia is a country that locks up children, pure and simple.

"The detention centres, which are run now by a subsidiary of an American penal company named the Wackenhut Corporation--Dickens couldn't have come up with a name like Wackenhut!--have become a national disgrace."

Keneally says he wrote The Tyrant's Novel as a counter to the demonisation of asylum seekers. "To demonise them, you have to tell lies. You have John Howard saying these people turn up here to outrage the decency of our values, to exploit us.

"I wanted to write a fable that showed that that might actually be the last thing on their mind, that they may not think it a great gig to risk border guards, to spend long periods in refugee camps, to then work their way down the long archipelagoes of earth, and then to travel in a leaky boat in some of the worst shark-infested seas in the world, for this big pay-off--'We get to outrage the moral decency of John Howard, what a lark!'"

Several of the asylum seekers he visited in detention were Iraqi. The stories he heard from them encouraged him to believe that he could produce a highly political novel that yet managed to avoid that dreaded pitfall, didacticism.

"Saddam's regime was a fantastical story. It's really astonishing the way that leaders are stealing fictions from us writers by incarnating the picaresque and the absurd and the Kafkaesque in their own being.

"It's impossible to say this, but Saddam was almost a fun tyrant, as long as you weren't the butt of it. Who else shoots football coaches if they fail in a local derby? Who else would call a meeting of 250 people close to him in the Ba'ath party, then name them, get them to stand up and go outside to be shot, all as part of the committee meeting? Who else would read Architectural News and then call his architect in and say, 'Scrap what you're doing with the grand hall and change it all by tonight.'?

"He was a grotesque. I read the piece about the impossible architectural deadline and thought, 'What if he had asked a writer for a novel in the same way?'"

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