River Town- Two Years on the Yangtze (1935)

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From Library Journal Here is another departure from the author of such widely diverse books as Confederates, Schindler's List, The Playmaker, and Woman of the Inner Sea. Australian Keneally draws on his immigrant heritage in this turn-of-the-century story of Tim Shea, an Irish storekeeper struggling with his own and society's demons to make a life for his family in New South Wales. Deaths frame the novel: Tim is haunted by the image of a nameless young woman, dead from an abortion, whose severed head is trotted around in a jar by the local constable in an effort to identify her; and after attending to a farmer killed in a gory buggy accident, Tim feels obliged to support the farmer's elder child, Lucy. First regarded as a hero for his quick action after the cart accident, then excoriated publicly for his anti-Boer War sentiments, Tim fears losing his business. A final quarantine after exposure to the black plague ends Tim's tribulations. The Irish/Australian dialect is difficult at first, and the narrative sometimes seems flat despite the often melodramatic events. Nevertheless, this book, which teems with themes from race and class discrimination to the wages of sin, has the flavor of a 19th-century novel, and Keneally may catch the historical saga market with it. [For an in-depth look at River Town and the publishing process, see "The Birth of a Book," on p. 122-124; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/94.]-Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal. --Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal" Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From With 21 novels to his name, including Schindler's List (1982), internationally acclaimed Australian writer Keneally navigates the fictional universe with consummate ease. His own family history figures in this intricate tale of small-town life in New South Wales at the end of the nineteenth century. Keneally's exquisitely moral and individualistic narrator, Tim Shea, is eager to cast off the restrictive social mores of his native Ireland but is also leery of the rough-and-tumble ethos of his frontier home. A barely solvent shopkeeper, his philosophical and spiritual balancing act is put to the test in a series of tragic events. First, when no one can, or will, identify a young woman who died trying to terminate a pregnancy, the police--in a grisly act of expedience that horrifies Tim--decapitate her and cart her head from town to town. Then, another accidental death of a stranger brings Lucy, an eerily self-possessed young girl, into his life just when his marvelously imperturbable wife, Kitty, is quarantined during a plague scare. Amid all these distressing trials and tribulations, Tim is also subject to vicious gossip, blatant harassment, a soul-searing conflict over his friendship with a Muslim herbalist, and serious financial woes. His river town, a tiny huddle in a vast and mysterious land, is rife with petty tyrants and their worthless taboos, but Tim holds his own, able to simultaneously open and steel his heart. Rich in context and psychologically elegant, this is a beautifully rendered tale that gains potency in reflection. Donna Seaman ### Amazon.com Review In 1996, 26-year-old Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a town on China's Yangtze River, to begin a two-year Peace Corps stint as a teacher at the local college. Along with fellow teacher Adam Meier, the two are the first foreigners to be in this part of the Sichuan province for 50 years. Expecting a calm couple of years, Hessler at first does not realize the social, cultural, and personal implications of being thrust into a such radically different society. In _River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze_, Hessler tells of his experience with the citizens of Fuling, the political and historical climate, and the feel of the city itself. "Few passengers disembark at Fuling ... and so Fuling appears like a break in a dream--the quiet river, the cabins full of travelers drifting off to sleep, the lights of the city rising from the blackness of the