Right And Wrong Once Again, Thomas Keneally Probes Moral Dilemmas By Creating An Ordinary Hero Who Wrestles With Choices

“A River Town” By Thomas Keneally (Nan Talese/Doubleday, 324 pages, $24)

Those who’ve read “Schindler’s List,” or “To Asmara,” or, most recently, “Woman of the Inner Sea,” know that Australian novelist Thomas Keneally’s heroes are ordinary people of sinewy integrity. His stories often turn on difficulties that arise when such people face ambiguous moral choices, when doing the right thing may lead to painful consequences.

Keneally’s stubborn heroes usually plunge right ahead, never mind those torpedoes.

The good man of “A River Town” is Tim Shea, whom the author has modeled on his own grandfather, Tim Keneally. The year is 1900. Because there’s nothing for them at home - “laughable land, no bloody dignity” - all the children of farmer Jeremiah Shea have left Ireland for Australia or America. Tim has found his niche behind the counter of T. Shea - General Store, in the Macleay River Valley of New South Wales, Australia.

He is the husband of the pragmatic, unimaginative but devoted Kitty, and the father of Johnny and Annie. He plays reluctant host to a steady stream of Kitty’s younger sisters arriving from Ireland.

He’s also the support of half the town of Kempsey, giving his customers credit on better terms than his suppliers allow him. The local VIP’s neglect to pay their bills when due; the implacable nuns have him feeding the convent virtually gratis. Much to Kitty’s consternation, when it comes to groceries, Tim is just a man who can’t say no. He even delivers.

But if Tim is a soft touch about material things, he’s firm on right and wrong. He dreams about the statuesque, Tennyson-quoting Winnie Malcolm but flees when her own interest becomes apparent. Infidelity, no matter how inviting, is wrong.

It is wrong, too, that the pickled head of a young woman is being carried about in a glass jar. The victim of a failed abortion, she remains unidentified until, late in the book, the mystery is solved. Until then, the local constable must carry the severed head from town to town in search of a name. Tim, a devout Catholic, is haunted by the young woman and her inability to receive a proper burial.

Also wrong, he thinks, is the recreation in a new world of the caste system that kept ordinary people starved for opportunity in the old. Even when he is invited into the upper levels of the local hierarchy, he refuses, and is punished by the wrath of those who equate refusal with insult.

The town leaders, represented by ambitious Ernie Malcolm, husband of Winnie, want Tim to wear a hero’s mantle. The town could use a local hero and Tim’s a likely candidate. With disregard for his own safety, he has helped the victims of a grisly road accident, pulling a dying man free from beneath his wagon and the pigs that are eating his face.

Exaggerated praise has been heaped upon Tim by Bandy Habash. Habash is a wily Afghan peddler who contributed equally to the rescue attempt but cannot, as a Muslim victim of local racism, be recognized for his own efforts. The best he can hope for is a bit of glory reflecting off Tim.

Later Tim dives overboard from an excursion boat to save his son Johnny, who proves to be a far better swimmer than his dad. Still, the hero label now seems likely to stick. Except that T. Shea’s not having it.

Looming larger than life in Kempsey are questions about Australia’s future. The pros and cons of federation are being argued. Federation would mean higher taxes, some say. (“We’ll need to have bloody taxes spent on keeping hopeless Tasmania afloat.”)

But there’s a bigger issue for these new Australians. “This all has to do with Britain,” according to one of them. “They would have us raise a federal army. And where would that army fight? … This army would die for British enterprises.”

Tim casts his vote for federation, for the sake of his children. “I wanted Johnny and Annie, if they chose, to live in South Australia or Western Australia on the same terms as the locals.”

But he’s dead against an Australian army fighting Britain’s wars. Speakers at a “Patriotic Fund” meeting, called to raise troops from New South Wales to fight for Britain in the Boer war, call for everyone present to take an oath supporting “without equivocation the aims of the British in Southern Africa.” Tim sits “with both hands planted on his knees” as the vote is taken, then rises to question the propriety of any such oath.

“Where in the bloody hell was this speech coming from?” he wonders. “His great-uncle John the rebel, in his days as a traveling drapery salesman, calling at Glenlara to punch him on the arm and say, ‘Are we up to the big life, Tim?’ “

For this and other crimes against the hierarchy, Tim is punished. Letters are written to his suppliers; his credit is pinched off. Singled out for a visit by an officer testing curfew enforcement, he receives a heavy fine for an after-hours sale. The shadow of ruin falls over his days and the head in the jar haunts his fretful sleep.

Tim’s rescuer is someone unexpected but not at all unlikely.

“A River Town” is not a page-turner. There’s a lot going on here - glimpses of the destruction of the aboriginal culture, a cricket game that’s likely to puzzle most American readers, even an outbreak of the plague - and plot elements take a deliciously long time to come together. But this novel is unmistakably the work of Thomas Keneally: humane in spirit, meticulous in craftsmanship, moral in tone.

It is his tribute to his grandparents and those like them who helped create a new nation in Australia. Keneally envisions a trilogy based on the characters in “A River Town,” the second book revisiting Tim and Kitty a decade later, the third following their son Johnny into World War I in 1914.