Why bother with Thomas Cook? For the price of a novel step aboard a Thomas Keneally tour of the world without leaving your armchair. Take off to Africa (Towards Asmara), the Middle East (The Tyrant’s Novel), to America (Confederates) or to wartime Germany (Schindler’s Ark).

Keneally’s tours outshine his titles. The People’s Train (emblematic of the Russian Revolution), is yet another lacklustre title. But, once aboard, the author’s restlessness pays off. You’re en route to Australia via Shanghai, then on to Russia, surveying the turbulent years of the early 20th century.

Artem Samsurov, a character based on a protégé of Lenin’s who in reality escaped from Russia to Queensland in 1911, reports from the “working man’s paradise” of Brisbane. Ambiguous irony has rarely seemed more stretched. The so-called working men are frequently on strike, the bosses tight fisted, the owners ruthless.

Samsurov isn’t the most expansive or psychologically shrewd of narrators: but Keneally refuses to let him bore us. As is observed in the novel, “Australia is not a country for political philosophy”, and Keneally, keeping tight rein on the dialectic, launches Samsurov into action. He starts a newspaper, urges resistance, then falls in love with Hope Mockridge, a married lawyer.

Romance though is thin on the ground, giving way to “fraternity and utility . . . the virtues of [Marxist] existence”. So Bolshevik Samsurov takes to hanging around with journalist Paddy Dykes, from Broken Hill. Dykes thrills to the gunfire, fistfights, spells of imprisonment, wildcat strikes and the kind of crowd scenes beloved by Cecil B. DeMille. Brisbane rises from the page.

It is Dykes’s journal, however, that lifts the novel’s drumbeat to a new fervour, advancing the story into a Russia on the brink of revolution with Samsurov’s return to his native soil. All the big beasts are here, from Lenin to Tolstoy to Stalin. And paradoxically, Keneally, set loose from Australia, writes more freely in Dykes’s persona, engaging beautifully with the raggedtrousered rhetoric and the covert rough and tumble of Bolshevik plotting amid the samovars and mattresses.

A lesser writer might lazily have succumbed to historical hindsight, but Keneally portrays the mayhem of Russia in flux with a stringent adherence to the order (and disorder) of things. He presents in convincing minutia the Russia that is, creating a brittle verisimilitude that makes its melodramatic endgame surprisingly real.

In an enlightening Author’s Note, concluding the book, Keneally hints at a sequel. As told by Dykes or by an omniscient narrator, this is a prospect to be relished. Artem Samsurov, though, like all good children of old, should be seen and not heard.

The People’s Train by Thomas Keneally Sceptre, £17.99; Buy this book.19; 408p

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