Betrayals a Family Madness

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Thomas Keneally, 50, is an Australian novelist (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), playwright (Bullie's House), screenwriter (Silver City) and movie actor (The Devil's Playground). The subjects of his nearly 20 books are equally protean: Joan of Arc, the U.S. Civil War battle at Antietam, World War I armistice negotiations, exploration in Antarctica. His 1982 volume, Schindler's List, set off a literary tempest: although it told of an actual German businessman who saved some 1,300 Jews from the Nazis, the book was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker McConnell prize for fiction, eligible apparently because Keneally used novelistic techniques of narrative and reconstruction in telling a true story.

In his most recent novel, A Family Madness, Keneally returns to the inexpungible memories of World War II, this time from the point of view of collaborators in the murder of Jews. His central characters are the Kabbelskis, a family of politically active Belorussians who make common cause with the Germans in an effort to secure an autonomous homeland for their people. They are motivated less by anti-Semitism than by the rueful lessons of a millennium of conquests from east and west. Banding together with other helpless minorities seems to offer no chance of gaining power. But connivance may. Stanislaw Kabbelski, a local police chief and, later, minister in a provisional Belorussian Cabinet, conspires in the deaths of strangers, then acquaintances, then family friends. His children witness the double-dealing and slaughter, committed by Germans and by Russian-sponsored Belorussian insurgents with equal abandon. Long before adolescence, the Kabbelski children are plunged into a world void of moral order. Kabbelski's soul-destroying deals are, moreover, made in vain: abandoned by the Germans, who are losing, and cheated by fellow Belorussians, who are maneuvering for postwar advantage, he becomes a fugitive. The family breaks up, but he and some of his clan finally fetch up in Australia, where they live on scraps of bitter memory and paranoid imaginings of a comparably tumultuous future. Although they appear to be part of the vast middle-class world in their adopted country, there is an untouchable inwardness in their spirits, and eventually they retreat into armed-survivalist hysteria.

Interwoven with this story of an inescapable past is a more conventional one of an unattainable future. Terry Delaney is a night watchman and second-rank professional rugby player who suffers the double curse of discontent and lack of direction. He has no complaints about his wife but longs for passion. He hopes athletics can lead to a job in journalism or public relations, his vague image of an easy life. He is unsettled by the changes he sees in Roman Catholic tradition, epitomized by a closet-gay parish priest. When Delaney meets the Kabbelskis, Stanislaw's granddaughter Danielle seems, with her assured exoticism, the God-given answer to his yearnings. Hired by her father's thuggish security service, Delaney couples with Danielle while on the job and realizes he is being auditioned for a place in the family. When the Kabbelskis abruptly withdraw to plan their private Armageddon, Delaney wrecks his life pursuing them.

In outline, this tale of sexual obsession may seem all too recognizable. What sustains A Family Madness is, as usual in Keneally's work, a precise sense of historical authenticity. The minutiae of Belorussian politics become surprisingly absorbing. He captures the chaos of Europe at the close of World War II and the ways in which fateful political decisions of that time may have been prompted by petty domestic concerns. He writes aphoristically, "There is that to be said for liberals--they may be in no way equipped for governing the world, but they are admirable in specific cases of injustice." And he makes such homilies seem the genuine beliefs, born of experience, of his characters. Keneally is equally at home, if less exciting, in lower-middle-class urban Australia and the locker rooms of also-ran athletes. These characters ring true, but they are not especially interesting. That, however, seems to be part of his strategy. The grayness of this humdrum world only makes the clashing colors of the Kabbelskis' lives more compelling. Keneally's real triumph is to portray, through one family's delusions, the lingering poison of war and betrayal among generations who outwardly appear to have escaped.