Customer Reviews

A Dutiful Daughter

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I've always been fond of Thomas Keneally. He's a sweet old grandfatherly bloke with a voice like gravel crunching underfoot and the face of Blinky Bill. Not to mention his work in the Australian Republican movement a-way back when, plus he wrote Schindler's Ark (Coronet Books), The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, and The Tyrant's Novel (Keneally, Thomas), all fascinating and important stories well told.

Some time ago, a friend mentioned that she'd once read a Tom Keneally that was very strange, about an insular family on a farm. The look on her face indicated deep disturbance, but she wouldn't be drawn on what was so wrong with the book - she just repeated the phrase, "very strange", with her eyes widened. My curiosity thus whet, I sought out "A Dutiful Daughter".

I can usually deal with "very strange". I love Angela Carter and Peter Carey, even at their most surreal. The taste extends to weird art and Man Ray, Duchamp, Picasso and Dali, Albert Tucker, Sid Nolan and James Gleason, whose work is all teeth and offal. But this, this was too much... Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does. A dictatorial daughter brandishing a syringe, people becoming bovine (literally), incest, bestiality, cow killing, a really stinking case of mastitis... and that's not the half. All that might have been bareable had it been well-written, but it hasn't; the prose manages to be spare, cliched and pompous all at once. It's as subtle and appetising as dog vomit on a Christmas cake.

A Dutiful Daughter is almost a caricature of writing of the 1970s, when writers tried really, really hard to shock--and it's certainly shocking (in more than one sense of the word). Ken Russell would have had a ball adapting it for screenplay, with Oliver Reed in the part of the father, Vanessa Redgrave as the mother, and the York twins Susanna and Michael as the siblings. The only things missing are nuns, bellows and chopped carrots.

What can I recommend to anyone normal who might think of reading "A Dutiful Daughter"?

Don't. It's not his best.

(Sorry Uncle Tom! x)

This is a truly disturbing book. I adore most of Keneally's works and this work is truly uncharacteristic. I special-ordered this book as it is out of print- and left it in an airport garbage bin more than half-way through it, so disturbed was I by the psychological portrait of a "dutiful daughter" who is raised in isolation, tends to her bizarre parents, welcomes home the prodigal son... there are scenes of bestiality in this book that are truly disturbing and do not add anything positive. A disturbing book can serve a purpose if it illuminates a situation for the reader or increases one's understanding. This book does neither. It simply disturbs. Do yourself a favor and steer clear.

This book is NOT representative of Keneally's work and so if you are one of the unfortunate souls who actually read this, try some of his other works. It is hard to believe such garbage came from the pen of the same man who wrote "Schindler's List", "A River Town", "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith", among others.

Shocked at the onset of puberty and the catastrophe she believes it brought on her parents, Barbara has since been a most dutiful daughter. Bound in dominance over them, she tends her afflicted parents, managing the beasts and the land single-handed on the isolated marshlands of Campbell's Reach. her brother Damian reveals the secrets that the family has shared for the past thirteen years. As the destructive forces within each of them move towards a climax, Barbara is impelled to make the ultimate sacrifice.

This is all very well, but the characters make decisions which are ultimatly unsubstantiated, and the reasoning protrayed in the novel is completely irellevant. Added to that it displays the darker side of the human psyche, and it brings farm animals into it as well.

This book, will be sure to freak you out. Unless you are one of those people who enjoy reading graphic scenes of semi/ beastiality and incest, i would sugest you steer clear. I wish i had advice like this, before i decided to read this book.

Anyone accustomed to some of Keneally light-hearted work, such as Jacko: the Great Intruder, or his narrative adventures, such as Victim of the Aurora, may be shocked by the depth and seriousness of this strange allegory of sin, responsibility, and the inability of generations to communicate about basic issues. Damian Glover, age seven, and his sister Barbara, age thirteen, are young people living on a remote farm in Australia when Barbara reaches puberty, an event for which she has received no advance preparation and which convinces her she is dying. Her harsh, fundamentalist parents are unprepared to deal with the emotional aspects of this event, and Barbara's coming of age ultimately transforms their lives, as she becomes a frightening force with whom they must reckon.

The growth of Barbara and Damian into independent people responsible for their own decisions takes place against a background of family secrets and trauma as they come to terms with sexuality and love and try to understand how and why their most basic instincts are considered sins by the moral authorities. Their parents have always simply accepted the values imposed upon them by the One True Church, and they offer neither guidance nor example to their needy children as Damian and Barbara try to answer questions about Nature and figure out how it ever came to be associated with Rightness or Sin.

This is neither an easy nor a pretty story. Its subject matter is sometimes bizarre and discomforting. The characters' behavior makes them hard to like and difficult to identify with, and Keneally's point of view is off-putting. Scenes are set and events are described in the usual third person, but all references to Damian, the character through whom we observe the action, are in the second person. A statement, such as "You are Barbara's brother Damian, sweating by the gate," may be descriptive, but it holds the reader at arm's length. Originally published in 1971, this allegory deals with some of the conundrums with which Keneally must have dealt during his years in the seminary and establish many of the themes which have informed his novels for the past thirty years. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple