"I was," says Thomas Keneally of his teenage sell, which slouched towards adulthood in a small Australian town in the 1950s, "a very strange little bugger." Whether or not this is an accurate assessment is hardly for the reader to say, but as a slice of self analysis it has a pleasing lack of pomposity as, indeed, does this memoir as a whole, concealing its razor sharp powers of observation beneath a fog of affectionate anecdote. His portrayal of classes with the Christian Brothers will strike an immediate chord with many Irish readers, as will the do I don't I agony of whether one might be in possession of that most elusive of items, a religious vocation. Keneally's vocation turned out to be of the literary kind, and its source is squarely identified here provided, of course, his father really did call Mr Banks the railway guard a "flobblegutted, wombat headed garper".
