Deep In The Outback

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: WOMAN OF THE INNER SEA

AUTHOR: THOMAS KENEALLY

PUBLISHER: DOUBLEDAY; 277 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: Australia's best-known and best-selling novelist fires up the interior of the continent as the crucible for a tale of loss and regeneration.

A rich and fashionable Australian woman loses her husband to another woman, and her two children in a mysterious house fire. She then flees into the Outback, where she attempts to erase her identity and, with it, her memories of humiliation and tragedy. As Thomas Keneally paints it, the landscape is almost biblical: an antipodean Sinai, where the flesh is challenged and the spirit purified.

By contrast, the world from which Kate Gaffney-Kozinski escapes is seen as numbing and corrupt. Immigration, corporate push and interlocking alliances have threatened the simpler traditions of mateship and the bush. There, the wounded Kate finds honest work as a barmaid at Murchison's Railway Hotel in a place called Myambagh. She acquires a flair for pouring beer, a taste for fattening food and a liking for a chap nicknamed Jelly -- not because of his shape but because he has a way with the explosive gelignite. Amid what Thomas Keneally labels "a safer Australia . . . where people called lunch dinner and dinner tea . . . and cooked on wood-burning stoves which had belonged to their grandmothers," Kate discovers "a pulse something like love, and certainly, like a brand of patriotism."

Keneally's romantic chauvinism runs wide and deep in his 20th work of fiction, which includes novels about the American Civil War (Confederates) and the Holocaust (Schindler's List). "City bad! Country good!" is the message never far from the heart of Kate's story. Were it not for the range of his talents, the temptation would be to compare Keneally to Larry McMurtry, the elegiast of the American suburb and Texas history. Both can go over the top and still keep readers asking "What next?" Especially Keneally, who can play it hot or cool, tragic or comic, without forgetting the basic tricks of the trade. Never show a stick of dynamite that does not go off in a later chapter. Don't discourse on a kangaroo's boxing ability if he isn't going to kick the stuffing out of someone later on.

In Woman of the Inner Sea, the intrigues and excesses of Sydney society provide delicious background and important plotting points. But the scenes are thin beside Kate's semi-legendary transformation into a tough bird of the outback. Keneally's long delay in revealing details about the death of Kate's children is a deliberate tease and annoyance.

The truth, when disclosed at the end, seems to belong to a slick thriller rather than to the work of emotional and spiritual impact that Keneally has written. But, as the poet Randall Jarrell said, "a novel is a prose narrative - of some length that has something wrong with it."