10th January 2024
The prolific Australian author Thomas Keneally (born in 1935) is probably best known for Schindler’s Ark, which won what was then the Booker McConnel Prize in 1982 and which was subsequently adapted for the screen by Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List (1993), the winner of 7 Academy Awards.
A Family Madness has two central characters. The first – in the part of the book’s narrative set in contemporary (mid 1980s) Sydney – is Terry Delaney, a young professional Rugby League player who is attempting to progress from his club’s third-grade team through the reserves and into the first-grade. At the start of the story, his on-field exploits have been halted due to a 6-month suspension for breaking an opponent’s jaw. His day job – though really his evening-to-night job – is as a guard protecting a number of industrial and commercial premises for Radislav (Rudi) Kabbel, the owner of a family-based security company, which also employs Kabbel’s sons Warwick and Scott and daughter Danielle.
The background story of Kabbel, our second key character, begins in the dark days of Byelorussia – then one of the Socialist Republics of the USSR – during and immediately after the Second World War. The events of this period are revealed through Rudi’s own written history of the Kabbelski family and his translation of the wartime journals of his father, Stanislaw Kabbelski, who was the Chief of Police in the city of Staroviche.
Stanislaw Kabbelski’s diary records begin in September 1941, when Byelorussia is under the control of the Germans and the systemic murder of Jews is under way. He is fully complicit in this. The actions come close to home when the young Rudi’s tutor – a First World War veteran called Hirschmann – is said, in the dreadful euphemism, to have “gone east”. In practice, it was probably to one of the mass graves on the Gomel road three miles west of the city.
Much of the central part of the book deals with the complexities within Byelorussian nationalism that surface both within the period of German occupation and then after the tide of the war changes, when the Red Army starts to make its inexorable progress through the region. Stanislaw Kabbelski is caught up in the bloody factional rivalry which continues after his family has fled to the west and into a Displaced Persons Camp run by the Americans. Indeed, it continues into the Australia of the 1950s, when he takes revenge on a fellow nationalist revealed to have been a Soviet spy.
Running in parallel with this part of the narrative is a catalogue of Delaney’s own difficulties, not least his suspension from playing, the pressures on his marriage resulting from his affair with Danielle Kabbel and the reckless actions of his ex-policeman friend, Brian Stanton, in which armed robbery graduates into something even more serious. There is much to admire in the way that Thomas Keneally weaves the various strands together.
For Delaney, it is the game of Rugby League – the principal sport in New South Wales – which provides him with the opportunities to gain kudos and respect, as well as financial reward. As Stanton mentions to Kabbel, whilst Delaney might work as a security guard, “he’s only filling time in between football matches”. Later, after one particular night-time skirmish when on security duty, “Delaney… sat crookedly in a seat in the waiting room [of the hospital], favouring his shoulder and wondering if he could play on Sunday”
Rugby League is a tough sport and, although Keneally is a long-standing supporter of the game, he does not pull his punches – literally – when describing the conflict between alpha males. We learn that one of Delaney’s team-mates was “a second-rower who had an evil reputation for twisting the testicles of the opposing hooker”. Later, an opposing centre “… another whizz-kid… had all the tricks, all the savageries. Before getting up, he gouged and scored Delaney’s eyeball with his blindside thumb… The crowd cheered,,, When tackled [he] always levered himself upright with a hand placed across Delaney’s face” It is Delaney’s act of violent retribution that gets him the 6-month suspension.
At the core of A Family Madness is Keneally’s assessment of the significant ethnic and cultural differences within the melting pot of Sydney’s working class. This is briefly raised in a reference to the suburb of Petersham, which reportedly housed 67 different nationalities: “The Greeks remembered what the Turks had done, as did the Armenians. The Christian Lebanese spat at the shadows of Muslim Lebanese…Croatians told their daughters not to talk to Serbians and in coffee shops Serbians muttered complicated curses at Croatians”. It is more explicit in Delaney’s ostracisation by the Sicilian family of his betrayed wife, Gina – “the child of a sturdy Italian couple from Palermo” – and, following his own affair with a Serbian girl, the vengeful and calculated violence attended to Brian Stanton by her wronged husband.
However, it is the Kabbel family that stand apart. At one level, there is the utter ruthlessness – observed first-hand by Delaney – with which Warwick Kabbel takes revenge on one of the guards working for a rival security company. More significantly, not least in the arsenal of weapons and booby traps that they accumulate, the family members make their preparations for “The Wave”, which they believe to be imminent and after which, when civil society has broken down, it will be every family for itself. (One of Delaney’s police contacts draws a comparison with the Jonestown cult in Guyana in 1978, the perpetrators/victims of a mass suicide-murder).
Above all, there are the Kabbels’ strict ties of family, which bind them together to the exclusion of everything else. After Delaney attempts to go through the formal procedures with the civic authorities in his attempt to rescue Danielle – and their child – from Rudi’s clutches, the response is horrific. As one of the wallopers – i.e. a policeman and also “a handy full-back from the local club” – cries in despair (at the end of Chapter 1), “Oh holy Jesus, Delaney! Who are those people?”
Footnote
[Although Belarus gained
its independence in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the
country’s political and economic structures remain firmly linked with those of modern-day
Russia].
JR Alexander 