Thomas Keneally: Lust for life and death

Tom Keneally's airy house perches on a hillside overlooking Bilgola Beach, a broad sweep of coffee-coloured sand in one of Sydney's more desirable coastal suburbs. From his office, which bulges with books and literary paraphernalia, he can watch lifesavers from his local club training in the Pacific Ocean surf - the epitome of bronzed Australian manhood.

Keneally considers himself a poor specimen of an Australian male, but he is nevertheless engrossed by the "heroic impulse" which he believes is a driving force for most men. Heroism, and women's bewilderment in the face of it, are the subject of his latest novel, The Widow and her Hero (Sceptre, £16.99).

Men are called to heroism above all in wartime, and at 71, Keneally - the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark, made into Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List - is old enough to remember the Second World War. For his countrymen, the conflict was largely about the threat posed by Japan, which bombed the northern city of Darwin and appeared on the verge of invading Australia. In his new novel, Leo Waterhouse, a dashing young captain whom Grace Duckworth marries in 1943, is captured by the Japanese and beheaded a month before the war ends. That makes him an "ipso facto hero" in Australian eyes - but the reality is more complex, as Grace spends the rest of her life finding out.

The plot is based on two daring wartime raids by Z Force, a joint Australian, New Zealand and British commando unit which used collapsible canoes to blow up Japanese ships in Singapore Harbour. The first, Operation Jaywick, succeeded against all the odds; the second, Operation Rimau, ended with all 23 men killed in action or executed.

Keneally has explored these themes before, most recently in Office of Innocence, his 2002 novel about wartime Sydney, told from the perspective of a young Roman Catholic priest. But he has always wanted to write about the raids - "so audacious, and so preposterous", he says - and he remains fascinated by the women of his mother's generation.

"I have never got over my amazement at them," he says. "They were such a remarkable crew, and they sucked their grief and incomprehension down so deeply. These women were losing their men at a certain rate. They would get a telegram on any given day, and that was it. No social workers came round, and there was no current-affairs programme on their doorstep asking how they felt."

Keneally's mother is still alive, at 93, "so I'd better watch it", he says with a loud cackle. His father, a Royal Australian Air Force pilot, was away for two and a half years during the war. He marvels at how such men were expected to return home and resume normal family life. "These men came back and became pisspots and wife-beaters - not my father, but I'm aware of that as part of the suburban reality of post-World War Two Australia.

"My father was very indulgent, and he was a very funny bloke, but he would get depressed. He had some sort of depression from the war that he never quite got over. And I was aware very soon, because I was 10 when he came back, that it was not just a matter of starting up again."

Keneally is an expansive interview subject. One question sets off a 20-minute stream of consciousness, ranging over past and present literary projects, politics, rugby league and his three grandchildren. His desk is covered in half-read books; behind him is a rugby ball signed by his favourite team, the Manly Sea Eagles. He gesticulates enthusiastically as he picks up and runs with some of the topics that hold him in thrall: Irish and American history, the Catholic church, Australian convict history, the Holocaust.

The author of 38 books including this, his 27th novel, Keneally has alternated of late between history and fiction. At present he is working on the first volume of a three-part history of Australia, covering the Pleistocene era to the present day and a novel about Bolsheviks who escaped from Siberia and settled in Brisbane. His last novel, The Tyrant's Novel, inspired by outrage at Australia's incarceration of asylum-seekers, was critically acclaimed but not popular at the bookstores. With The Widow and her Hero, "I'm in danger of becoming readable ... grossly readable," he says, with another guffaw, "so I hope that with the Bolsheviks I'll be right back there".

Widow... sees him once again probing the question of how Australia fits into the wider world. But the core theme is universal. Keneally says he has always been interested in the relationship between men and heroism, "and how we're called to heroism, even a wimp like me... and how it can destroy you, because most of us are not really up to it... and how we then come back shattered to these women, for whom heroism is of very little importance".

There are no great wars nowadays, but he believes that men are still driven by dreams of heroism. "It's one of the things sport is for. It's why there's motor racing, abseiling, unnecessary climbs of Everest. Human history hasn't gone on long enough to cure us of how brave we had to be to fight the mastodon [a giant prehistoric animal]. It's a potent engine for good and ill of male behaviour."

As a young woman, Grace, a bank manager's daughter, accepts the expectations placed on men in wartime. But in later life she asks: "What is so precious about the heroic impulse? Why do ordinary lusty boys love it better in the end than lust itself, and better than love? Why did Leo - judging by his actions - love the Boss, Charlie Doucette, in a way that rose above love of any woman, me included?"

Doucette is the leader of Leo's unit, an eccentric British army major who inspires unconditional loyalty from his men. After a dummy run in Townsville, north Queensland, they embark on Operation Cornflakes, attaching limpet mines to ships anchored in Singapore waters. An Australian submarine drops them off, and then brings them home to a hero's welcome. They are decorated and promoted. "They've become Ulysses," says Keneally, "nothing can stop them. Then the second mission is a catastrophic endeavour, as it was in reality."

The story of Ulysses is one of the book's leitmotifs. Doucette, a charismatic Ulsterman who escaped from Singapore after it fell to the Japanese, takes Homer's Odyssey with him on Operation Cornflakes. Grace, Keneally's narrator, observes that the Homeric idea of having to earn a woman's love is "a handy one for nations who are organising their young for war and bloodshed".

Leo, Grace's husband, is brave, handsome and noble. He looks like Errol Flynn, everyone agrees. But it is Doucette, based on Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Lyon of the Gordon Highlanders, who is the novel's Ulysses figure. "He's a ripper," says Keneally. "He's a classic hero, like Lawrence of Arabia. And he was in reality too. Lyon, like Doucette, was a hopeless garrison soldier but a marvellous irregular."

Grace's English friend, Dotty, the wife of Rufus Mortmain, a monocled Englishman, hates Doucette for leading their husbands on self-destructive escapades. By the second mission, called Operation Memerang in the novel, Leo and Rufus realise that they have to "keep Doucette out of trouble by following him into it", as Dotty puts it. Marital love cannot compete with "mateship", Grace and Dotty acknowledge, although they do not understand it. "And there are still women who are living with this mystery - why did he have to do it?" says Keneally.

Widowed at 25, Grace does not wish to know too much, but figures from the past keep appearing, forcing her to confront more details of Leo's story. She becomes haunted by the idea that his death was "for so little purpose".

Keneally, who writes with ease in a woman's voice, is known for his painstaking historical research. He shows me a cardboard box full of old documents, including the transcript of the show trial where the Operation Rimau men were sentenced to death.

Other writers marvel at his prodigious work rate, turning out a new book almost every year. He shrugs. "I'm a hard worker. And I have a considerable well of ideas. I'm so lucky to be still writing at this age, and to have the hopes and yearnings of a young man. I'll go on writing until I'm gaga, or until I drop, or whatever."

Biography

Thomas Keneally was born in New South Wales in 1935 and educated at St Patrick's College, Strathfield. He entered the seminary to train as a Catholic priest, but left before his ordination. He worked as a school teacher in Sydney and lectured at the University of New England from 1968-70. He has written 38 books as well as a number of plays and screenplays. His non-fiction includes Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime and Homebush Boy: A Memoir. His fiction includes the Booker-prize-winning Schindler's Ark, which was made into Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, Flying Hero Class and The Widow and her Hero, published this week. Thomas Keneally lives in Bilgola Beach, Sydney.

Kathy Marks is The Independent's Asia Pacific correspondent