| Passenger | |
| Author: | Thomas Keneally |
| Country: | Australia |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Fiction |
| Publisher: | Collins, Australia |
| Release Date: | 1979 |
| Media Type: | |
| 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: