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Title: The Survivor

Author: Tom Kenneally

Narrator: James Wright

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-05-12

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Alec Ramsey is the survivor of a disastrous Antarctic expedition which abandoned his revered friend and leader of the party, Stephen Leeming. For 40 years, in the security of academia, Ramsey has nurtured with guilt his doubts about this incident. Now Leeming's body is, against all odds, to be exhumed from the Antarctic icecap, and Ramsey must confront his obsession and decide whether he really did - or can continue to - survive at all.

Critic Reviews:

"His tone is often wry, sometimes faintly cynical, but his purpose is always investigatory. It is a fine and truthful balance." (The Times of London)

Members Reviews:

One Star

Was not what I expected and thus was disappointr

The Iceman Cometh Back

The Survivor (1969) is an interesting early work from Schindlerâs Ark author Thomas Keneally about Alec Ramsey, an aging former polar explorer who finds out that the body of his expeditionâs leader, Stephen Leeming, may have been found in the Antarctic. This disturbs him and he spends much of the novel fretting about it and then discouraging retrieval of the body. Apparently, there are secrets buried with Leemingâs body, or at least thatâs what we are led to believe.

Ramsey is frankly a jerk who at the bookâs start insults his hosts at a Rotarian dinner where he was invited to speak, and near the end insults the American military types who had discovered Leemingâs body and have behaved very decently about what to do with it. Ramsey is difficult to sympathize with and his truculence fairly tiresome.

To me the best parts of the book were those set in the academic environment Ramsey occupies (heâs a professor at a branch university). There is an especially great scene of a faculty party where the guest of honor, a famous poet, shows up drunk and randy. The concluding scenes, in the Antarctic as Leemingâs body is being retrieved, give the book a dramatic wind-up, complete with a few surprises and twists, but to me Ramseyâs relative unlikeability marred my enjoyment of the book.

Was it just a massive guilt trip?

I really like Thomas Keneally's work, but unfortunately The Survivor does not rank among my favourites. In the Epilogue of The Survivor, on the fourth last page, Alec Ramsey (the protagonist) receives a postcard which concludes with "... one day I'd like you to try to explain what it was all about." I felt the same - what was that all about? Clearly a massive guilt trip, all sorts of hysteria, obsession and copious overtones of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Set against a background of provincial university life and misadventures on the great white continent, all this is then intertwined with lashings of Catholic liturgy. Keneally loves to dabble in Catholic sacraments and beliefs, which sometimes leaves non-Catholic readers struggling for comprehension. I think I get the gist of the imagery - last supper, consecration of bread and wine, sacred relics released from the glacier, even the `mystic' body ascending heavenwards - but can't be sure of the nuances.