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Bettany's Book
Thomas Keneally
400pp, Sceptre
£16.99
Buy it at BOL
The first thing to be said about Thomas Keneally's new novel, Bettany's Book - indeed, the first thing to be said about almost any Keneally novel - is that it is very long. Keneally can always be depended upon: wherever and whenever they are set, his books are reassuringly thick and dense. There is nothing dilletantish, frittering or minor about them.
In Bettany's Book the familiar steady pace is set by around page five. "A graduate of the military academy in Modena and an officer in Mussolini's armies in Libya, Lorenzo had been a prisoner of war in Australia during the second world war....