The Book of Science and Antiquities
THOMAS KENEALLY
(SCEPTRE, 336 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

This is the 32nd novel by Thomas Keneally, best known for Schindler’s Ark, and it could hardly be more wide-ranging in terms of timescale. There are two narrators: one, Shade, is a Palaeolithic man, an indigenous pre-Australian, from 42,000 years ago, living with his clan in what is now New South Wales; the other, Shelby, is a modern-day documentary film-maker from Sydney, based to some extent on Keneally himself.

Keneally has sometimes been criticised for making his historical novels too stripped of factual details and too similar in tone to the present. Here, he can make free with Palaeolithic ways, conjuring up a world with his customary dry Antipodean energy. It may seem risky for a whitefella to “horn in on Aboriginal tales”, as Keneally puts it in his author’s note. But, he says, these Palaeolithic humans “speak of all our ancestors, black or white”, and of a time when our species was not the dominating force.