‘religion’. When poetry was something that happened ‘outside’ the
covers of books, when song was magical and shook the sun, when
art was an habitual process of the body like breathing and
excreting, and when death – of which I happen to be ridiculously
scared – was a passageway and not a brick wall (Keneally,
1981:65-66).I t is also worth noting that Keneally has a penchant of reconstituting
characters in his various works; a Cleary appears in both Season in Purgatory, and
Bullie’s House, both characters representing something elementally primitive. A
Pelham appears in Season in Purgatory and The Survivor, although the character in
that latter work does not experience an epiphany as does the one in the former.
However, the most obvious archetypal character to reappear throughout the
Keneally canon is the oath-breaking apostate, always of Neitzschean stature, seen
in the Keneally protagonists. I t is the European literature which reveals and focuses
Keneally’s most deeply felt and compelling obsession in a way quite different to that
of his other works. It is the way Keneally expresses this obsession; of the depths to
which the human soul can plunge, of the way he portrays the divided soul caught
helplessly between despair and affirmation, against a value charged landscape.
Gene Kellog has identified what he calls the ‘Catholic novel’, one in which the
villains are secularized or lapsed Catholics [ or apostates] and who, through their
actions, exemplify the greatest weaknesses of their society. Kellog explains that the
author of such a novel exhibits a tendency to enter into his subject by a “ ...process
akin to mysticism”, that he portrays not only the human spirit, but all of nature as
being under a metaphysical shadow because a flaw at the heart of the universe has
estranged him from God (Kellog, 1970:274). That ‘process akin to mysticism’ might
rather been seen in terms of the shamanic powers at play in the creation and
reading of a work of fiction, discussed in Chapter 6.
5.3 Colleen McCullough: The Alchemist
I have entitled my analysis of a selection from the corpus of Colleen
McCullough The Alchemist because what at first appears to be popular, recensionist
historical fact or pulp romance, as distinct from elite literature, is really only the
base material that McCullough uses to create the alchemical gold of mythopoeic
text. What one notices most about McCullough’s writing is its contradictory or
dichotomous nature; moving from fact to imagined emotions and motivations, a