The Dickens Boy

June 1, 2021

The tenth child of world-renowned author Charles Dickens, Edward has been stumbling through life when he is sent to Australia to make something of himself. In the Outback, amid colonials and Aborigine peoples, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, bushrangers, and stock agents, he tries to show himself--and the father whose books he has never read--that he can succeed. Once again, the author of Schindler's List aims to vivify real-life figures; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 4, 2021
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.

October 1, 2021
The author of Schindler's List (1982) imagines the adventures of Charles Dickens' youngest son in Australia. Edward Dickens is 16 when he submits to his father's encouragement and leaves England to work on a sheep ranch Down Under. The young man, who narrates the novel, carries two burdens: He has been a disappointment in school and he hasn't read his father's novels. Australia is meant to address one of those problems by providing him with prospects and possibly a career. He must only "apply" himself. The verb and goal are repeated with a frequency matched only by references to his ignorance of pater's corpus, especially as almost every Australian he meets reveres Dickens senior and is well versed in the canon. Edward's older brother Alfred manages a sheep station two days' ride away, where he has nurtured a taste for alcohol and a bitterness about his father's treatment of his wife and children. He compares his and Edward's fates to those of transported criminals. Keneally writes eloquently of his native country's natural beauty and provides several colorful episodes for his young hero, particularly one involving a gang of bushrangers--escaped convicts who have turned to banditry--who go easy on Edward's ranch when they learn who he is and realize they must deliver some sad family news. In fact, most of the characters are as nice as the bandits, which makes Edward's life easier but deprives him and the novel of the essential conflict that fiction requires. The book's mostly rosy lens extends even to the treatment of Aboriginal people in colonial Australia, although the darker side of that picture does eventually emerge. Keneally is an accomplished historical novelist, but the history and fiction here aren't as compelling as they should be. An intriguing but uneven sidebar to the Dickens saga.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2021
Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens was sent to Australia at the precarious age of 16 by his father, Charles, then the reigning king of English letters. Edward, the youngest of ten children, had floundered at school and shown little interest in the literary arts. In fact, he had yet to read his father's writing. Distinguished Australian writer Keneally, however, clearly knows his Dickens. In this roguishly tender coming-of-age story, a young man who lives in the shadow of his world-famous father hopes to prove himself and make his fortune Down Under. That path seems uncertain as young Edward begins his apprenticeship at a rural sheep station, learning about the varieties of wool and the vagaries of shearing. Keneally liberally and seamlessly integrates Dickensian allusions, references, and quotes as he weaves his tale and positively delights in spinning the local vernacular into his own Shakespearean yarns. Keneally brings authority and insight to his depictions of his homeland and its people, striking a perfect balance of the historical and poetic while also addressing race issues obliquely yet thoughtfully. The ""guvnor"" would approve.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.