From the Marrow

By Christopher Porterfield

THE CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH

by THOMAS KENEALLY 178 pages. Viking. $6.50.

In the rugged homestead country of Australia one evening in 1900, the wife of one of the area's white settlers answers a knock at her farmhouse door. Out of the darkness rushes the hired man, an aboriginal, flailing about with an ax. Moments later the farmer's wife, her two daughters and a schoolmistress-boarder lie hacked to death.

What sort of creature could commit such an act? Could the seemingly random slaughter have any kind of meaning?

Exploring these questions Australian Novelist Keneally seems to write from within the marrow of his protagonist. Without blinking the horror, which is based on a real incident, he makes it what it rarely seems to be in real life: plausible and thus human.

Keneally's Jimmie Blacksmith is actually only half aboriginal. His father was a nameless white man. Jimmie's mixed strain is both judgment and destiny. Mentally but not emotionally weaned from the chants and lore of a now decadent tribal heritage, he tries to make his way as a houseboy and laborer in the harsh, pinched world of white Protestants--the missionaries and farmers who are claiming the open land. From them Jimmie learns the snobbery of materialism, according to which "possession [is] a holy state."

The possession that Jimmie covets above all is a white wife. When he gets one--a dim, sniveling, pregnant teenager whose child does not even turn out to be his--a murderous rage is born. Jimmie realizes that the white side of his nature is as doomed to suffocation as the black. Cheated by his employers, taunted and humiliated beyond endurance, he undertakes mayhem as a sort of mad ritual, an attempt to be for once the white man's priest and judge instead of his willing nigger.

Keneally's narrative has the short, brutal rhythm of the ax, each stroke glinting with images of hallucinatory brilliance (in a flash of revulsion against his aboriginal brethren, Jimmie imagines "a vineyard of gallows from which hung all the inept, unfortunate race, emphatically asleep"). Occasionally, Keneally overheats his language, invoking the pull of blood and the core of blackness in a way that recalls D.H. Lawrence in a rant. But most of the time the novel's intensity arises naturally from the dualities that throb at its center --black and white, crime and punishment, civilization and savagery.

Keneally has written six notable novels, usually dealing either with the small domestic crises of the soul or with spin-offs from historic incidents. It is a measure of his craft that he does not try to plug these themes into today's headlines for a cheap jolt of relevance. Jimmie's tale is played out against a background of incidental chatter and speculation about Australian federation, which in 1900 united the continent's six major colonies into a commonwealth. In the end the reader sees that this is not the background, but the whole point. The tragic contradictions in Jimmie's life are in fact the unresolved agonies out of which a nation is to be created.

. Christopher Porterfield

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