The Dickens Boy
A Novel
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning author of modern classics such as Schindler’s List and Napoleon’s Last Island is at his triumphant best with this “engrossing and transporting” (Financial Times) novel about the adventures of Charles Dickens’s son in the Australian Outback during the 1860s.
Edward Dickens, the tenth child of England’s most famous author Charles Dickens, has consistently let his parents down. Unable to apply himself at school and adrift in life, the teenaged boy is sent to Australia in the hopes that he can make something of himself—or at least fail out of the public eye.
He soon finds himself in the remote Outback, surrounded by Aboriginals, colonials, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women. Determined to prove to his parents and more importantly, himself, that he can succeed in this vast and unfamiliar wilderness, Edward works hard at his new life amidst various livestock, bushrangers, shifty stock agents, and frontier battles.
By reimagining the tale of a fascinating yet little-known figure in history, this “roguishly tender coming-of-age story” (Booklist) offers penetrating insights into Colonialism and the fate of Australia’s indigenous people, and a wonderfully intimate portrait of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of his son.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Keneally's moving if diffuse latest (his 34th, after The Book of Science and Antiquities) follows the youngest son of Charles Dickens as he leaves Britain for Australia in 1868. Dickens sends the drifting, academically lackluster "Plorn," as Edward is known to family and friends, to work on a vast sheep station in the hopes that it will instill within the boy the drive he lacks. Under the mentorship of station manager Frederic Bonney, an intelligent Englishman fascinated by photography and the indigenous Paakantyi people still living on the land, Plorn's humility, hard work, and resourcefulness shine. Yet even in Australia, Dickens seems ever-present. The white people Plorn meets are awed to know the son of the man Bonney calls "the archpriest of humanity, the supreme master of story," and Plorn is too ashamed to admit he hasn't read any of his father's books. His older brother Alfred remains angered by Dickens's public separation with their mother, Catherine, 10 years earlier, but Plorn refuses to acknowledge his father's flaws. Later, as he masters a trade, falls in love, and witnesses Australia's growing pains, he struggles to accept his father's complexity. Though the series of episodes generate only mild suspense and largely reproduce the historical record, the author rewards with well-drawn physical and inner landscapes. Still, this is for Dickens obsessives only.
