I have read all of David Malouf’s novels, I thought. Each year I give the undergraduate intern with whom I work a David Malouf novel as a thank you. These interns are international students, and I reason that a Malouf novel gives them a little more of Australia to take home. I also think that they should read novels, and that having one in hand before a long flight home to Sweden, Germany, Poland, or the United States might be read. One lives in hope for there is no other way to live.
In july 2012 when I purchased the annual Malouf novel for the intern, I noticed that among the list of his novels there was an early one which I had not read, Fly Away Peter (1982).
I put it on my Amazon Wish List and sure enough, Santa gave it to me for Christmas, in the person of daughter Julie.
It is a slight book of 132 pages. In its few pages Malouf offers another chapter in the story of Australia that he has been telling in his novels. In this case, it is World War I on the Western Front. His descriptions of the weariness to death in the mud and rain amid the rats and the stink and filth of corpses is transcended by the bird watching that brought the three main characters together. Believe it or not.
The two men in Europe occasionally escape from the inferno consuming them when seeing or remembering a bird. Likewise the woman back in Queensland feels connected to them, when she holds her breath and peers through binoculars at a sandpiper.
There are many elegiac moments, when the birds ascend, when the migrants arrive, when each man learns of the other’s submission (there is no other word for) to the birds.
I continue to stand ready to nominate David Malouf for a Nobel Prize for literature. I just wish there were more of these stories of Australia from his hand.
Johnno (1975)
Fly Away Peter (1982)
Harland’s Half Acre (1984)
Antipodes (1985)
12 Edmonstone Street (1985)
The Great World (1990)
Remembering Babylon (1993)
The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996)
Then there are the other novels, the plays, the poetry, the libretti, the essays, the introductions. I once bought an expensive coffee table book just so I could read his introduction to it.
Once again the tools for bolding, underlining, and inserting hyperlinks are not available. Nor does the tool for uploading an image of the cover work.