I have long thought Australian author Thomas Keneally writes very badly, at least in his mother tongue. A stunning new example of his poor writing skills is the opening sentence – the opening sentence, mind! – of an invited letter that appears in the latest issue of the Australian long-form magazine, Quarterly Essay (Issue 96, November 2024, page 91). Keneally’s words:

What I like about Watson’s mind is his capacity to connect the mytho-poetic to the political, and he can do it without hearing from him, generally, any grunt of effort.”

I stumbled at this sentence, and it took me a while to parse it. Who is the “him” in the second part of the sentence? If it is Watson himself, why would Watson be hearing anything from himself? Eventually, I realized that the subject doing the “hearing” was not Watson, but someone else. What Keneally intended to write, perhaps, was:

. . . and he can do it without us hearing from him, generally, any grunt of effort.”

Or perhaps:

. . . and he can do it without us hearing emerge from him, generally, any grunt of effort.”

Even with this correction, which allows us to parse the sentence more readily, the wording is ungainly, since it switches attention from Watson to those hearing Watson. I have met people who change their deictic pointers (ie, the person or object to whom a pronoun refers) in their heads without updating the references of the pointers in their speech. Such people are most confusing to converse with. Perhaps Keneally is one of these people. Or perhaps, he dictates his writing and loses track of the deictic pointers as he does so, as Henry James was wont to do.

Or perhaps, he simply cannot write. As with Graham Greene and David Caute, why Keneally is so feted as an author when he writes so badly has long been a mystery to me.