THE DICKENS BOY

The author of Schindler’s List (1982) imagines the adventures of Charles Dickens’ youngest son in Australia.

Edward Dickens is 16 when he submits to his father’s encouragement and leaves England to work on a sheep ranch Down Under. The young man, who narrates the novel, carries two burdens: He has been a disappointment in school and he hasn’t read his father’s novels. Australia is meant to address one of those problems by providing him with prospects and possibly a career. He must only “apply” himself. The verb and goal are repeated with a frequency matched only by references to his ignorance of pater’s corpus, especially as almost every Australian he meets reveres Dickens senior and is well versed in the canon. Edward’s older brother Alfred manages a sheep station two days’ ride away, where he has nurtured a taste for alcohol and a bitterness about his father’s treatment of his wife and children. He compares his and Edward’s fates to those of transported criminals. Keneally writes eloquently of his native country’s natural beauty and provides several colorful episodes for his young hero, particularly one involving a gang of bushrangers—escaped convicts who have turned to banditry—who go easy on Edward’s ranch when they learn who he is and realize they must deliver some sad family news. In fact, most of the characters are as nice as the bandits, which makes Edward’s life easier but deprives him and the novel of the essential conflict that fiction requires. The book’s mostly rosy lens extends even to the treatment of Aboriginal people in colonial Australia, although the darker side of that picture does eventually emerge. Keneally is an accomplished historical novelist, but the history and fiction here aren’t as compelling as they should be.

An intriguing but uneven sidebar to the Dickens saga.