Passenger (Keneally novel)

Passenger

Author	Thomas Keneally
Language	English
Genre	Fiction
Publisher	Collins, Australia
Publication date	1979
Publication place	Australia
Media type	Print
Pages	186 pp
ISBN	0002216299
Preceded by	A Victim of the Aurora
Followed by	Confederates

Passenger (1979) is a novel by Australian writer Thomas Keneally.^[1]

The narrator of this novel is a foetus in utero, who watches the outside world through his mother's eyes. He observes the break-up of his parents' marriage, his mother's incarceration in a mental hospital, and her eventual escape and travel to Australia, where he is born.

"To Trish Sheppard and Iain Findlay."

In the Canberra Times Hope Hewitt was a little annoyed with the main character: "In practice it provides a novel excuse for the oldest of narrative conventions: the omniscient narrator. It also provides for a variation on the Romantic notion of the wise child; and I confess that there were moments when the little man became so polysyllabically philosophical or his creator so cutely whimsical that I found myself wishing the brat would remain unborn...But apart from a few irritations with the conventions of the fantasy, Passenger is an entertaining book, with its constant changes of scene and its unexpected uses of language."^[2]

After its original publication in 1979 by Collins,^[3] the novel was published as follows:

• Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, USA, 1978^[1]
• Fontana, UK, 1980^[4]

• 1979 in Australian literature