The Dickens Boy

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. (Mar.)