Customer Reviews

The Playmaker (New Portway Large Print Books)

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This finely crafted work is one of Keneally's most notable. Portraying a man in an agony of moral conflict over his love for a woman convict yet constantly aware of the family left behind in England, The Playmaker addresses human feelings at many levels. Like so many of his books, Keneally has taken figures from history, weaving a plausible tale of the life they might have led. His examination of the mind and heart of Lieutenant Ralph Clark, during the early years of the Port Jackson [Sydney] prison colony, a is deeply moving account. Far from home, these exiled people face disturbing choices. Keneally compares the founders of the Sydney colony with space travellers, isolated in a dangerous situation with limited resources.

Clark's task is the staging of a play in celebration of the king's birthday. Assembling a cast from the convicts, he's confronted with a range of personalities from house maids to forgers. Keneally's research has dredged up backgrounds of these transported felons; the thieves' guild oath is a particularly fine touch. His real talent, however, is in presenting this material through his characters . Each of his figures projects a reality surpassing other writers of historical fiction. While his descriptive narrative may make modern allusions, none of his persona are dragged out of their original time frame. Ralph Clark is particularly well drawn. Keneally has a special talent for presenting us with an 18th Century man's feelings and aspirations as much as it's possible for us to know them.

That this book has been returned to the active sales list is a testament to its value. It should be read by more people. The 18th Century setting is less important than what Keneally has to say about people. Add this book to your shelves with confidence. It's worth more than a single read.

I read this book seveal years ago, before Keneally's name became so widely known as a result of the success of Schindler's List (the movie). This book stands out in my memory for the great ability to transport us to a different time, place and way of thinking. I found it to have been very skillfully written. I subsequently read other books of his as a result of the pleasure derived from this one and was not disappointed.This book deserves to be more widely known.

In 1788, the First Fleet landed in Botany Bay to establish a penal colony. In 1789, Lieutenant Ralph Clark is commissioned by H.E. (unnamed in the novel but historically Governor Arthur Phillip) to stage a play in honour of the King's birthday. George Farquhar's comedy `The Recruiting Officer' (first performed in 1706) is the play: the fact that the colony possessed only two copies of the script was the least of the handicaps to be overcome. Lieutenant Clark selects his cast from the convicts: burglars, whores and highwaymen. Most of the convicts are illiterate, rehearsals will be challenging and costuming rudimentary.

There are many levels to this novel. Staging the play - bringing British culture to the Antipodes - provides a backdrop for this period of the tentative new colony. Ralph Clark himself is torn between the family he has left behind and his feelings for a female convict who is one of the actors in the play. Woven around historical fact, this novel brings people and place to life. The play, that civilizing event, is being staged in a struggling community formed by exile.

I enjoyed this novel and Mr Keneally's depiction of this period of Australia's colonial history. Thomas Keneally wrote in the epilogue: `For yes, though they are fantastical creatures, they all lived.' Imagine that.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

If you enjoy the arts, colonial history,

Greek mythology, drama...it's in there...Keneally weaved all these teams brilliantly to create a masterpiece in my opinion.

I don't really like starting a review with the setting - as if that's more key than the quality of characters, plot, dialogue, style etc. - but that's what I feel like I have to do with this book. The setting overwhelms the story for me, the setting is where this starts and finishes. Of course setting is absolutely crucial for many stories - but I want more. Keneally does give more, but I still think he relies more on the presumed resonance of this (to an Australian anyway) famous historical time and place than actually evoking something that resonates on its own.

I felt at such a distance from most of the characters. Some of this is perhaps conscious as we see from Lieutenant Ralph Clarke's perspective, and his reserve is a key aspect of his character. However much of it felt condescending - smug tourists relishing a visit to colourful characters, smirking at their antics or being shocked at their bizarre practises, before returning to their air-conditioned hotels. The lags were so colourful - the whole `Tawny Prince' mythology, Dabby Bryant's mysticism, queen Goose, winking at the noose, Black Ceasar - that they stopped being people. They were more their trappings than individuals.

I fall back on it too often, but pretty much these days all the historical fiction I read is put up against Patrick O'Brian. Well, actually a lot of other fiction too - and that's the point: Aubrey and Maturin are such triumphs as characters: they're allowed to be different without becoming caricatures, and without losing the basic humanity that we can identify with; we don't have to dismiss them as fools or elevate them as fantastical heroes. The rich knowledge of their time and place (fairly contemporary with `Playmaker' as it happens) integrates with rather than overwhelms the people.

The earliest days of Sydney, Australia, and the prison colony which was its first population center provide a dynamic setting for this ambitious, old-fashioned novel. With a broad scope, grand design, and sensitive treatment of universal themes, it has the weightiness of an epic, but is far more vigorous and more involving than that, with vivid, sympathetic characters who come fully to life.

Transported halfway around the world to a forbidding and alien landscape, men and women prisoners share their personal struggles, providing a vitality and emotional punch one does not often find in fiction. The reader soon discovers that the prisoners are not all that different, of course, from the civil servants and Marines who administer the colony--everyone in Port Jackson (Sydney) is a prisoner in some way or another, be it physical, spiritual, or emotional.

Lt. Ralph Clark's decision to produce George Farquhar's early 18th century comedy, The Recruiting Officer, with an all-prisoner cast leads to many emotional conflicts. Though the play provides the participants with a way to achieve a measure of dignity, they must still bow to the strictures of the colony off stage. Many prisoners wield cruel powers over other prisoners, while Marines and administrators exert power over both the prisoners and the aborigine inhabitants of the area. The restrictions imposed by the church, in the person of Rev. Dick Johnson, aggravate tensions by concentrating on rules of behavior rather than on the human soul.

Against this backdrop of the restrictions on their lives, Keneally's characters are set in high relief, their humanity contrasting sharply with the impersonal forms of government which are imposed upon them. Meticulously depicting 18th century England, its government, its penal system, and its social structure, along with early Australia, its first western inhabitants, the decimation of the aborigine population, and the social conflicts faced by its characters, this is one of Keneally's greatest novels, a timeless story based on real journals, stunning in its effect. Mary Whipple