contents of the external world, including synchronistic phenomena
(Tarnas, 2006:84).Thus, the many references to implicit if not overt homosexuality, as is often the
case throughout the Keneally corpus, and in this work on pages 19, 21, 22, 68, 111,
and 155, which also suggest again a ‘craftier theology’, a process that manifests
when something in the outer and inner worlds becomes coterminous. For example,
in Season in Purgatory, there is Twinkum and the other homosexual British officers
at his villa (Keneally, 1976:13). These men are, in a sense, echoic of the members
of the Sacred Band of Thebes; soldiers, elite homosexual couples who fought
together in ancient Greece (Davidson, 2007:5), the same general geographic area in
which this tale is set. Then too, there is David’s friendship with the older physician,
Major Patrick Ellis who admits to him “...if it hadn’t been for the war I would have
run away with a twenty-three year old nurse or had an affair with a Guardsman“
(Keneally, 1976:166). The motif of homosexuality or bisexuality serves to the
reiterate the theme of potentially latent, volatile homosexuality attributed to all
I mperialist men in Keneally’s European novels. Such forceful sexual energy is given
expression when in a less structured, more elemental world and represents the
bisexual shaman archetype or character, common throughout the whole of the
Keneally corpus. Keneally’s world is an elemental one where women, representing
the feminine earth element, have “...an ancient kinship with cats and snakes and
other gods” (Keneally, 1976:190).
(d) The Child Again
I n the case of the Marshal, Clemenceau, Wemyss and Weygand, some
perverse event in their lives, often occurring in childhood, becomes the “... moment
(that) reverberated in him all his life” (Keneally, 1975:183). The Marshal believes
himself to be a mystic (Keneally, 1975:77). Wemyss is the progeny of a family
which perceived things in supernatural omens and so he is compelled to see things
by “... concentrating on the keeping of his monocle in his right eye” (Keneally,
1975:139); a single, unlidded eye being the symbol of the Divine Essence and of
Divine Knowledge (Chevalier & Gheerbrant, 1994:363). Keneally implies that there
are processes, archetypes in which all individuals are inextricably caught up for the
whole of their lives and this is why he continually alludes in this work to soldiers as
children or as childlike: “ ... three elite children from OHL” (1975:200) “ ... the