... a book of philosophy, a novel that seeks significance in the most vital arena ... This is a story of how to die but also of how to live. If it reeks of death, it also bristles with what makes life worth living ... The style is deceptively facile. Keneally, curiously, remains an underrated writer. This may be because he is astonishingly prolific ... Keneally has remained consistently engaging, provocative and original down the years ... a book of wonder and regular brilliance ... Keneally’s art is to make the profound accessible. The important is rendered seamlessly ... invigorating.
... markedly Australian ... Taken together, the two themes reflect on family life, morality, values, community support, co-operation or violence and maintaining peace – the principles and the realities for both the indigenous Australian and one from a First World or Western culture – over many millennia.
... sometimes has the feel of a late-life stock-taking exercise in novel form ... a mixed bag. There is a sense of too many elements — both narrative and thematic — being shoehorned in. Some of Shelby’s reminiscences feel irrelevant, as if Keneally has included them mainly to fill space, or because they mirror the author’s own experiences ... And yet these flaws are redeemed, to a large extent, by the sheer enjoyableness of the Shade chapters. His adventures are consistently memorable, and it is well worth reading this novel for them alone ... Has Keneally captured anything important about human life 42,000 years ago? Probably not. But he has clearly had fun trying, and so will readers of this book.
Is The Book of Science and Antiquities a sly existential joke, or an entirely solemn endeavour? It’s billed as the latter, as Keneally’s most candid work of fiction to date, a kind of grand human hymn. But there’s a wink or two that suggests he is chuckling into the cosmic void ... For all its expansive intentions, it’s a book whose delights are quiet ... 20th-century literature is a diligent and exhaustive catalogue of male senescence raging against the dying of the light. It’s hard to get excited about another eulogy to virility. The Book of Science and Antiquities lacks JM Coetzee’s caustic cruelty, or Philip Roth’s grotesque libidinousness. Shelby isn’t delightfully awful, he’s just tiresomely ordinary. Perhaps this is the novel’s lurking punchline – that the mundane can be mythic, and the mythic, mundane. The joke would be funnier if the women in Keneally’s novel weren’t confined to roles of warm-bodied consolation. There is a Learned Woman, too, but her story remains – tellingly – untold.
Keneally is a writer of immeasurable talents, with an eye for the human drama that makes history. The intertwined stories of men from different eras keep the reader wondering how it will all come together. But this novel falters in the alternately perplexing and overwrought writing in Shade’s voice, which reads like The Clan of the Cave Bear as imagined by 'Penthouse' magazine ... At 84, Keneally writes of a man’s mortality. I’d much rather read Cath's and Learned Woman’s perspectives.
By looping these seemingly disparate narratives across time, Keneally meditates on the unchanged rhythm of human emotion from the Pleistocene to the Holocene epochs. Unfortunately, with the focus squarely on philosophical musings, this novel suffers from a wandering plot and a lack of character development. Keneally’s language ranges from richly descriptive to captivating, but the structure of the book ultimately works against its readability ... Fans of Keneally’s work will find some gems here, but they will have to dig for them.
Big topics are addressed: manhood, love, war, humanity’s past and future, the meaning of life, the nature of death. But Apple isn’t engaging in his ponderings, and Learned Man’s world befuddles as often as it intrigues. The women in both eras are strong but mostly serve as objects of men’s affection or lust—and those prehistoric sex scenes should maybe have been taken out back and buried ... Dedicated readers might excavate nuggets of wisdom, but most will wonder if the expedition was worth it.
... inventive but disappointing ... While the intriguing premise allows Keneally to delve into themes of leaving a legacy and man’s place within nature, unfortunately, both characters remain underdeveloped and Learned Man’s narrative is delivered in dry prose. This won’t go down as one of Keneally’s better works.
