'There is something ruthlessly enchanting about Napoleon' - Thomas Keneally to appear at book festival

“But then you would not expect me – an Australian bush republican – to be into Emperors!” says the pleasingly pixieish, puckish-featured, prolific 80-year-old author, whose latest, hugely enjoyable 430-page novel, Napoleon’s Last Island, is set during Bonaparte’s exile on the island of St Helena. In a dazzling act of literary ventriloquism, it is narrated by the high-spirited, teenage English girl who fell under the charismatic Boney’s spell and became his friend and playmate in his final years.

When we meet over coffee on a sunny Sunday morning at the London hotel where the Sydney-based, “remarkably chipper” Keneally and his wife, Judith, are staying, the wizard from Oz insists that he has “never carried a torch for the Emperor Napoleon.”

Nonetheless, he writes in the opening pages of the novel – his 31st – which he’ll be discussing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, “There is something ruthlessly enchanting about Napoleon... Counting in the blood and waste and all, the late phases of the French Revolution, the Consulate and then the Empire have an ineffable style, in ideas and new politics, in art and human venturing, which still compel our imaginations. Style in clothing, too.”

And this is what compelled the imagination of the Booker Prizewinning author of the bestselling Schindler’s Ark when he happened upon a 2012 exhibition at the National Galleries of Victoria, in Melbourne, featuring a collection of Napoleon’s garments, uniforms, furniture, china, paintings, military decorations and memorabilia. And all those feminine fashions, “which could not have been reproduced by anyone who was not French and of that period.” He was “bowled over” by what he saw on the mannequins.

“Those glamorous aspects of the era have always fascinated me for the good reason that no one ever says, ‘We are saving up for a Hitlerian sofa for our flat,’ or ‘We’ve just got this Stalinist cabinet,’” he says with a merry cackle.

He was mesmerised by many objects in the exhibition: the classic Empire chairs, the Sevres porcelain, the silver plates, as well as a swatch of the emperor’s hair and his death mask. Most intriguing of all, though, Keneally found a name in the catalogue, one Betsy Balcombe. “Someone called Betsy was a familiar of the Emperor? And ended up in Australia? I was fascinated.”

A master storyteller of prodigiously long historical fictions, Keneally is renowned for using real events while playing fast and loose with facts, most famously with Schindler’s Ark, retitled Schindler’s List after the Oscar-winning success of Spielberg’s movie version. He soon realised he had stumbled on a terrific, true tale. It emerged that the adolescent Betsy had lived on the mid-Atlantic island of St Helena, where Napoleon was billeted temporarily with her family and where her father was an East India company official.

The odd couple’s innocent, teasing friendship was recounted some 30 years later when Betsy, a tomboy who grew up to become a great beauty, published a journal in 1844 purportedly written during that time. Keneally learnt that many objects on display were connected with the Balcombes, who were eventually sent into exile by the British, basically for being nice to the “Great Ogre.” They were transported to Australia. “From the smallest prison in the world to the largest!” exclaims Keneally amid more gales of cheerful laughter.

Keneally, who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times and awarded Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin award twice, has written in the female voice in the past – in Bettany’s Book (2002), related by two beautiful siblings, and more recently in Daughters of Mars (2012), also narrated by sisters serving as nurses during the First World War – but Betsy presented a huge challenge. How could an aged Australian writer credibly render a girl, and a Georgian one, too, with the justice and affection he felt for her after reading her journals?

He does so with vivacious charm, I tell him. Well, he responds, he read a great deal about the education of Georgian young women. He has done a lot of close observation of women. He has been married to Judith for more than half a century – they visited St Helena to mark their 50th wedding anniversary last year – and he’s the father of two daughters, Jane and Meg. (He’s co-authoring a series of crime novels with the latter and there’s talk of Benedict Cumberbatch playing their sleuth in the TV series).

Keneally also has a 13-year-old granddaughter, Alexandra, “a spirited girl, Germaine would be proud of her.” He would dearly love her to play Betsy in the projected TV series, for which the producers will be auditioning in London in August, so she will be coming to Edinburgh with him.

“By the way, the TV series is not being made by the people who made Wolf Hall -- as reported. One of the people involved did work on those programmes. But as to whether it gets made depends on who they cast as Betsy. I really enjoyed writing in her voice -- her tongue is related to [Thackeray’s] Becky Sharp’s, though Betsy would be too wise to say half the things Becky says in Vanity Fair, but then Becky Sharp would be too wise to say half what Betsy, a bit of a wild island girl, says!” he exclaims.

“You know, when I first heard about this girl and her family, who were destroyed by their association with Napoleon and how they ended up in Australia, I was really gripped. I felt compelled to write what purports to be a secret journal, the one hidden behind the real one -- with apologies to the highly intelligent Betsy’s lively ghost! But there are gaps and silences, abundant mysteries in her text. There are so many questions, in Betsy’s journal. There are subtexts, things hinted at rather than mentioned. So I don’t know if a lot of things I’ve written in this book happened at all. But the relationship between Napoleon and the Balcombes is an extraordinary tale, without any invention thrown in at all.

“Still, I am interested in the ‘divine lies’ of fiction. After all, I’m a novelist and novelists tell truths by telling lies, which is why, for example, I chose to tell Oskar Schindler’s story as fiction. Anyway, it’s not so strange for an Australian to have written Schindler’s List if his father was actually involved in the campaigns in Africa and was sending him back memorabilia all the time. So, yes, my interest was piqued when I found the Balcombes had been transported on trumped up charges to Australia. Because I was raised at the end of the earth, a place that had a dead heart at its centre, seemingly hostile to Europeans, it’s always interested me the way Australia was used as a repository for unsatisfactory people.

“It wasn’t only convicts who were sent to Australia -- as Jack says to Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Your uncle says you must choose between this world, the next world, or Australia.’ So Australia as the appendix of all mediocrity and shame has always fascinated me. I don’t make a big thing about the Balcombes being transported but it is an important aspect. Imprisonment is a theme I return to, maybe because I was a Catholic seminarian, and both Judith’s family and mine have convicts in them. It’s a badge of nobility in Australia now.”

Does he also concede that Napoleon’s Last Island engages with themes he has pursued in so many of his novels: exile and alienation?

“Yes, that’s right. Of course we who began as a commonwealth of rejects and a penal settlement, we now have a quite harsh immigration policy pursued by both the major parties. The big problem is to stop the boats, as it is your country’s. The problem is you can only stop the boats if you have an international scheme. But we chose to depict asylum seekers as miscreants, which of course they are not.” Indeed, a few months ago Keneally informed his prime minister in a furious [itals]j’accuse[end itals] that the “processing centre” for refugees and illegal immigrants on the island on Nauru, which is smaller than St Helena, is Australia’s shame.

“It’s a big problem and I could ear-bash you about this for hours, because we made that problem, invading Iraq and messing in the Middle East for years and here’s Syria, a bone of contention as far back as 1918. Our hands are not clean. We created the instability that generates these tides of people. I think you are right, there are echoes of that in this book but much as I am engaged with these issues back home, for me this novel is mainly about the idea of a family getting so close to a human phenomenon, a man of destiny, and their life is marred by it and diminished by it, that’s what got me.”

So is he a “deep-tooted Anglophobe” as one national newspaper critic suggested when reviewing Napoleon’s Last Island, claiming that Keneally had “demonised England’s treatment of Napoleon?”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!,” he responds. “Well, there was definitely nastiness towards him from the British, although he was a lord of destruction. But I was raised with Anglophobia, both Australian Anglophobia and Irish Anglophobia from my grandparents. But I have found Great Britain is a big commonwealth, the land of Tom Payne and Lord Castlereagh. It is the land of Byron, although Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland are of course other countries. But no, God help us, I am not an Anglophobe. It’s like humans everywhere – the ones who are s***s are good at being s***s wherever they come from. There are others who are angels of enlightenment; I love British enthusiasm.”

Trained as a Catholic priest, Keneally was never ordained. He felt empowered to write, “or rather to try to write,” when he read Nobel prizewinning Australian Patrick White’s novels, particularly his masterpiece, Voss. Keneally has already written his next novel and is working on the 33rd, while he has published some 20 non-fiction works, including his monumental, four-volume history of Australia, several plays and children’s books.

But are all his novels destined to fall under the long shadow cast by his own masterpiece, Schindler’s List?

“I don’t mind if they do,” he replies amiably. “It’s given me something to do in my old age, to try to unseat that one book.” Cue more contagious chuckling.

Napoleon’s Last Island, by Thomas Keneally (Sceptre, £18.99). Thomas Keneally is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 16.