The Dickens Boy
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- € 3,99
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By the Booker-winning author of Schindler's Ark, a vibrant novel about Charles Dickens' son and his little-known adventures in the Australian Outback.
In 1868, Charles Dickens dispatches his youngest child, sixteen-year-old Edward, to Australia.
Posted to a remote sheep station in New South Wales, Edward discovers that his father's fame has reached even there, as has the gossip about his father's scandalous liaison with an actress. Amid colonists, ex-convicts, local tribespeople and a handful of eligible young women, Edward strives to be his own man - and keep secret the fact that he's read none of his father's novels.
Conjuring up a life of sheep-droving, horse-racing and cricket tournaments in a community riven with tensions and prejudice, the story of Edward's adventures also affords an intimate portrait of Dickens' himself.
This vivacious novel is classic Keneally: historical figures and events re-imagined with verve, humour and compassion.
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.
