What do you think?
Rate this book
Jacko: The Great Intruder
Written by the author of "Schindler's List", "Flying Hero Class", "The Playmaker" and "The Place Where Souls are Born", this novel captures the contrast between American and Australian culture today through the exploits of one Jacko Emptor.
- GenresFiction
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
5 people are currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Keneally
115 books1,262 followersThomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction. He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982, which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Often published under the name Tom Keneally in Australia.
Life and Career:
Born in Sydney, Keneally was educated at St Patrick's College, Strathfield, where a writing prize was named after him. He entered St Patrick's Seminary, Manly to train as a Catholic priest but left before his ordination. He worked as a Sydney schoolteacher before his success as a novelist, and he was a lecturer at the University of New England (1968–70). He has also written screenplays, memoirs and non-fiction books.
Keneally was known as "Mick" until 1964 but began using the name Thomas when he started publishing, after advice from his publisher to use what was really his first name. He is most famous for his Schindler's Ark (1982) (later republished as Schindler's List), which won the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler's List (1993). Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.
Keneally has also acted in a handful of films. He had a small role in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (based on his novel) and played Father Marshall in the Fred Schepisi movie, The Devil's Playground (1976) (not to be confused with a similarly-titled documentary by Lucy Walker about the Amish rite of passage called rumspringa).
In 1983, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). He is an Australian Living Treasure.
He is a strong advocate of the Australian republic, meaning the severing of all ties with the British monarchy, and published a book on the subject in Our Republic (1993). Several of his Republican essays appear on the web site of the Australian Republican Movement.
Keneally is a keen supporter of rugby league football, in particular the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles club of the NRL. He made an appearance in the rugby league drama film The Final Winter (2007).
In March 2009, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, gave an autographed copy of Keneally's Lincoln biography to President Barack Obama as a state gift.
Most recently Thomas Keneally featured as a writer in the critically acclaimed Australian drama, Our Sunburnt Country.
Thomas Keneally's nephew Ben is married to the former NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally.
Often published under the name Tom Keneally in Australia.
Life and Career:
Born in Sydney, Keneally was educated at St Patrick's College, Strathfield, where a writing prize was named after him. He entered St Patrick's Seminary, Manly to train as a Catholic priest but left before his ordination. He worked as a Sydney schoolteacher before his success as a novelist, and he was a lecturer at the University of New England (1968–70). He has also written screenplays, memoirs and non-fiction books.
Keneally was known as "Mick" until 1964 but began using the name Thomas when he started publishing, after advice from his publisher to use what was really his first name. He is most famous for his Schindler's Ark (1982) (later republished as Schindler's List), which won the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler's List (1993). Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.
Keneally has also acted in a handful of films. He had a small role in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (based on his novel) and played Father Marshall in the Fred Schepisi movie, The Devil's Playground (1976) (not to be confused with a similarly-titled documentary by Lucy Walker about the Amish rite of passage called rumspringa).
In 1983, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). He is an Australian Living Treasure.
He is a strong advocate of the Australian republic, meaning the severing of all ties with the British monarchy, and published a book on the subject in Our Republic (1993). Several of his Republican essays appear on the web site of the Australian Republican Movement.
Keneally is a keen supporter of rugby league football, in particular the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles club of the NRL. He made an appearance in the rugby league drama film The Final Winter (2007).
In March 2009, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, gave an autographed copy of Keneally's Lincoln biography to President Barack Obama as a state gift.
Most recently Thomas Keneally featured as a writer in the critically acclaimed Australian drama, Our Sunburnt Country.
Thomas Keneally's nephew Ben is married to the former NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 18, 2023
From what I've read, comfortably one of Tom's odder books. It was written around the same time as Woman of the Inner Sea, where it seems as though he was trying to channel some of Peter Carey's popular blend of absurdist happenstance and earthy mysticism.
In my opinion Woman of the Inner Sea was a triumph. It wasn't at all opaque in its meaning, but its themes and narrative made it easy to project or discover meaning. Jacko is a significantly more confused book, that ranges all over the planet and frequently leaves its title character in its wake for chapters at a time to focus on the other members of his family.
So who is Jacko? I assume he's a roman a clef of somebody, but I've got no idea who it would be. I only assume this because the book is bursting at the seams of them, most of whom probably won't be familiar for overseas readers but instantly clear to Australians of a certain age (Dame Joan Sutherland, Patrick White, Fred Schepisi, Rupert Murdoch, playwright David Williamson, etc.) But anyway, Jacko Emptor is a big lug of a bloke from a Northern Territory cattle fiefdom who has become an obnoxiously garrulous TV presenter, and is exported to bemused Americans by Rupert Murdoch on his new network Fox. Sorry, I mean, Basil Sutherland on his new network Vixen. His specialty is ambushing people on live television, barging into their homes and seeing what stories they have.
The story opens with Jacko doing this schtick on a ludicrous scale, clambering from a cherry picker into a 12th storey Manhattan apartment, and then encountering a veteran who says he has been expecting him and asks him to rescue his kidnapped daughter. It's quite the opening, but this narrative thread gets discarded with a chronologically skittish yarn. The narrator (Keneally himself) explains how he came to know the Emptor family at their cattle station, and Jacko's younger wastrel opera-loving brother in Sydney.
You may find yourself thinking, hang on, Sydney, Manhattam, the Northern Territory? Where is this book anchored? Well, it's not. There's also diversions in San Bernardino and Berlin. It's a wild rambling ride that gives somewhat equal weight in its telling to lamenting the superficial yet pretentious arts scene of Sydney with the incredible demeaning cruelty dreamt up by misogynists. It's also very funny (or at least absurd) in parts, particularly with its telling of the incredibly frenzied and chaotic coverage of the Berlin Wall.
If you're a fan of Keneally and knowledgable of (or at least interested in) Austraia I can tentatively recommend the book. As always, his prose is brilliant and insightful. There's a lot to love in this book for a particular kind of reader, and I hope they found it.
In my opinion Woman of the Inner Sea was a triumph. It wasn't at all opaque in its meaning, but its themes and narrative made it easy to project or discover meaning. Jacko is a significantly more confused book, that ranges all over the planet and frequently leaves its title character in its wake for chapters at a time to focus on the other members of his family.
So who is Jacko? I assume he's a roman a clef of somebody, but I've got no idea who it would be. I only assume this because the book is bursting at the seams of them, most of whom probably won't be familiar for overseas readers but instantly clear to Australians of a certain age (Dame Joan Sutherland, Patrick White, Fred Schepisi, Rupert Murdoch, playwright David Williamson, etc.) But anyway, Jacko Emptor is a big lug of a bloke from a Northern Territory cattle fiefdom who has become an obnoxiously garrulous TV presenter, and is exported to bemused Americans by Rupert Murdoch on his new network Fox. Sorry, I mean, Basil Sutherland on his new network Vixen. His specialty is ambushing people on live television, barging into their homes and seeing what stories they have.
The story opens with Jacko doing this schtick on a ludicrous scale, clambering from a cherry picker into a 12th storey Manhattan apartment, and then encountering a veteran who says he has been expecting him and asks him to rescue his kidnapped daughter. It's quite the opening, but this narrative thread gets discarded with a chronologically skittish yarn. The narrator (Keneally himself) explains how he came to know the Emptor family at their cattle station, and Jacko's younger wastrel opera-loving brother in Sydney.
You may find yourself thinking, hang on, Sydney, Manhattam, the Northern Territory? Where is this book anchored? Well, it's not. There's also diversions in San Bernardino and Berlin. It's a wild rambling ride that gives somewhat equal weight in its telling to lamenting the superficial yet pretentious arts scene of Sydney with the incredible demeaning cruelty dreamt up by misogynists. It's also very funny (or at least absurd) in parts, particularly with its telling of the incredibly frenzied and chaotic coverage of the Berlin Wall.
If you're a fan of Keneally and knowledgable of (or at least interested in) Austraia I can tentatively recommend the book. As always, his prose is brilliant and insightful. There's a lot to love in this book for a particular kind of reader, and I hope they found it.
July 11, 2025
Jacko is the story a son of an Australian cattle baron. He has became the popular star of an American morning tv show in which he inveigles himself into people’s homes to find stories for his viewers.
The narrator is a friend of Jacko’s who happens to be an Australian novelist and could be seen as a fictionalised Keneally. Indeed, any Australian reader is likely to interpret a few characters as being heavily fictionalised versions of other famous Australians: the head of Jacko’s network, Basil Sutherland, could be Rupert Murdoch, just as the network, Vixen 6, could be Fox; Nobel-winning novelist Michael Bickham could only be Patrick White; and so on.
But these can be seen as knowing winks to Australian readers; not recognising them should not detract from the pleasures of the novel for non-Australians.
The many strands of the novel include it being set partially in New York and partially in the Northern Territory, with occasional forays into other locations. Similarly, although Jacko is the central thread of the story, the book would be lost without several other main characters, mainly other member of his family: his cattle baron father and literature-loving mother on the huge outback cattle station, his opera-loving Sydney-based brother, and many others.
Recommended, especially to Australians and Antone interested in or familiar with the country. I have one small reservation , but that would mean a minor spoiler, so I’ll add that as a comment on this review do it can be ignored.
The narrator is a friend of Jacko’s who happens to be an Australian novelist and could be seen as a fictionalised Keneally. Indeed, any Australian reader is likely to interpret a few characters as being heavily fictionalised versions of other famous Australians: the head of Jacko’s network, Basil Sutherland, could be Rupert Murdoch, just as the network, Vixen 6, could be Fox; Nobel-winning novelist Michael Bickham could only be Patrick White; and so on.
But these can be seen as knowing winks to Australian readers; not recognising them should not detract from the pleasures of the novel for non-Australians.
The many strands of the novel include it being set partially in New York and partially in the Northern Territory, with occasional forays into other locations. Similarly, although Jacko is the central thread of the story, the book would be lost without several other main characters, mainly other member of his family: his cattle baron father and literature-loving mother on the huge outback cattle station, his opera-loving Sydney-based brother, and many others.
Recommended, especially to Australians and Antone interested in or familiar with the country. I have one small reservation , but that would mean a minor spoiler, so I’ll add that as a comment on this review do it can be ignored.
December 13, 2025
3.5 stars. An entertaining character based novel, made up of ‘newsworthy’ incidents, about Jacko, a cheeky, larrikin, womanizing, Australian TV reporter for an American TV show, narrated by an unnamed Australian writer. Jacko is an ambitious, energetic, rough, cunning, enthusiastic, crude, hardy individual, who lives a daring, sometimes careless life, willing to overstep social boundaries for shock effect and to get the best out of a story. He is an intruder, invading homes to interview people, to get what he can, breaking contracts. He can be compassionate at times. For example, he finds a missing person and is so touched by her situation that he scraps the sensational story in the offering, and pays for her to travel to Australia to recover.
Here is a quote from the book from the first page of the novel:
‘You could argue that factors other than locked door deprivation governed the direction Jacko later took. You could claim,for example, that Jacko would not have come to the most crowded and locked-up city of the western world, the Rome of its day, if Basil Sutherland, the Australian media colossus, had not raided America. Sutherland chose to found his own network in the United Staes, and invited in the television producer Darkin and his friend Jacko to bring peculiarly Australian television-mayhem to an already vulgarized medium”.
This book was first published in 1993.
Here is a quote from the book from the first page of the novel:
‘You could argue that factors other than locked door deprivation governed the direction Jacko later took. You could claim,for example, that Jacko would not have come to the most crowded and locked-up city of the western world, the Rome of its day, if Basil Sutherland, the Australian media colossus, had not raided America. Sutherland chose to found his own network in the United Staes, and invited in the television producer Darkin and his friend Jacko to bring peculiarly Australian television-mayhem to an already vulgarized medium”.
This book was first published in 1993.
October 27, 2020
3.5 stars. Enjoyable and convincing but not as satisfying as his best work. A rather loose narrative woven around the titular Jacko and his eccentric family back in Australia, as told by the narrator, an older Australian - a writer, clearly based on one T.Keneally. Jacko is an Aussie larrikin employed by a Rupert Murdoch-style Australian-owned TV network in America to amuse morning TV viewers with silly doorstep stunts.
The drawback for me is that this story isn't really enough to drive the novel; there appears to be a more important plot developing around Jacko's uncharacteristic commitment to an accidental foray into serious journalism (using his fame to help in the search for a missing young woman), but this rather peters out and the book becomes what it perhaps would have been more comfortable being - a series of short stories about Australians abroad.
Overall, worth reading if you like Thomas Keneally (and I do) but it wouldn't convince a new reader that he was worth exploring further. Keneally neophytes, don't start with this one !
The drawback for me is that this story isn't really enough to drive the novel; there appears to be a more important plot developing around Jacko's uncharacteristic commitment to an accidental foray into serious journalism (using his fame to help in the search for a missing young woman), but this rather peters out and the book becomes what it perhaps would have been more comfortable being - a series of short stories about Australians abroad.
Overall, worth reading if you like Thomas Keneally (and I do) but it wouldn't convince a new reader that he was worth exploring further. Keneally neophytes, don't start with this one !
September 6, 2021
Meh. I just don't get it do I? I enjoyed the story enough and the characters were interesting. The end of the story was not satisfying to me.
January 15, 2025
Such a shame I didn't like this. Ever since Schindler's List, I I've wanted to read another book by Mr. Keneally. The story was really original but the writing just too wordy for me.
May 23, 2015
In the past month or so I have read some good books and some, in my opinion, poor ones. Sadly this book belongs in the second category. I picked it up from outside a tutor's office as he was having a clear-out and I had hoped that I would at least enjoy some chapters of it. Instead I found they blurred into one another, and not in a good way. This book is currently residing in a growing pile of future donations I'll make to my nearest charity shop.
April 26, 2017
I'm a little in two minds on this, the last of my most recent set of second hand bounty. It is a very readable satire on media values and the differences between Australian and American culture, funny in places and thought provoking in others, but overall I struggled to engage with the characters.
February 8, 2015
One of my favourite books. I've read it countless times over the years.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews