Product Description
In his first novel in more than a decade, David Malouf—arguably Australia’s greatest living writer—gives us a stirring reimagination of one of the most famous passages in all of literature: Achilles’ rageful slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam’s attempt to ransom his son’s body in Homer’s The Iliad.
 
A moving novel of suffering, sorrow and redemption, Ransom tells the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and woeful Priam, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. Each man’s grief must confront the other’s for surcease and resolution: a resolution more compelling to both than the demands of war. For when the wizened father and the vicious murderer of his son meet, “the past and present blend, enemies exchange places, hatred turns to understanding, youth pities age mourning youth.”* 
 
Ransom is a tour de force, incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and its unstated imperative that we imagine our lives in the glow of fellow feeling.
 
 
 
*Quote from Alberto Manguel’s review in The Australian. Please see Reviews. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

the gods would be angry...
Anyone who has read a few of the translations of Homer's epic would immediately realize this book is mostly taken from those translations. The only originality is the author's inserted 'short story' creation of the relationship of Priam with the mule driver and how it gives Priam pause to think of how ordinary men live their lives. The art of storytelling belongs to Homer and this book lies in the shadow of the gods.

Wonderful book especially for lovers of the Iliad
David Malouf has given us a real gem.A beautifully written and imaginative account with multiple layers of meaning throughout.It is almost as if he is writing something that is much more worth reading and thinking about than the many other accounts of Troy given in recent years by authors and movie-directors alike.In a way he has rescued Homer's story by taking it the depth and beauty it deserves.Truly a great book.

Ransom
"Ransom" by David Malouf gives us a story within the story of the siege and eventual destruction of Troy. Priam, the king of Troy, and Achilles, the tragic hero of the battle, come together in a beautifully written tale that takes us inside their lives. Unlike the Iliad, Malouf shows us the heroic aspect of each on the human level. I put books I like into two categories: 1) those I like so much I have to reread and 2) others that may be reread sometime. This book falls into the first.

Story Tellling at its Best
This is a superlative book that adds a poingnant and vibrant dimension to the well-known story of the Iliad.It is especially revealing on the isolation of a king and a father from acting out roles that require them to distance themselves from what they love.The story is about the re-discovery of the beauty and tenuousness of life amidst an overwhelming sense of mortality.It is a quick and easay read, but fundamentally heartbreaking.Very close to perfect!

`He has stepped into a space that until now was uninhabited and found a way to fill it.'
In this novel, David Malouf re-enters the world of the Iliad, to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector and provides a very different telling of Priam's journey to the Greek camp.And what a wonderful storytelling it is!

`Dreams are subtle, shifting, they are meant to be read, not taken literally.'

At the end of the novel, Mr Malouf writes that the primary focus of the story is on storytelling itself: why stories are told and why we need to hear them; how stories get changed in the telling; and how much of what it has to tell are `untold tales' found only in the margins of earlier writers.It is possible to read the novel simply enjoying the story without wondering about these broader issues, but they add their own dimension to the writing.It is possible, too, to enjoy this novel without any detailed knowledge of the Iliad.In my case, at least, it stirs a revisiting of the world of the Iliad and probably of the Odyssey, to enjoy those legends anew.

`This old fellow, like most story tellers, is a stealer of other men's tales, of other men's lives.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith
... Read more

Product Description
In the mid-1840s, a 13-year-old British cabin boy is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, he moves back into the world of Europeans. "Wonderfully wise and moving . . . a dazzling fable of human hope and imperfection."--The New York Times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

Never received the book
I never received the book although I waited a month- no explanation.When I complained, I was told that they only accept Amazon credit cards- no more emails from them- I am angry.

What is civilized? What is savage?
Can one truely define what it means to be civilized and what it means to be savage? David Malouf focuses on questions like these in his novel "Remembering Babylon". The main character, Gemmy Fairley, is a British boy, who was washed ashore in the lands of the native inhabitants of Australia and taken in by them. Years later, Gemmy encounters a settlement of British colonizers, where he is taken in by the McIvor family.
In the course of the novel, the reader is confronted with the feelings of different settlers concerning Gemmy and the native people of Australia. As he acts the way the natives of Australia do, the settlers cannot decide, whether Gemmy is truely British. In order to contrast their rascist behavior, Malouf gives the reader a background of the settlers. He relates their life stories in a moving manner, showing how the dreams and hopes that the settlers had before coming to Australia, have been shattered.

Remembering Babylon
I read this for a class on British Lit Post-WWII. It's one of those books that I know I wouldn't have picked up off a shelf on my own, but I enjoyed it. Malouf uses a lot of imagery to convey the emotions in both characters and the community as they cope in their own ways with Gemmy. A very interesting story about a white man who is lost overboard a ship as a child, and raised by the aborigines until he comes upon a settlement of whites. Definitely an intriguing look at race (he is known among the settlers as the "black-white man"), community, and identity.

Exile
Lachlan Beattie, a boy of Queensland, encounters Gemmy Fairley, a ragged castaway.Gemmy had learned the speech of the Aborigines and he had lived among them.He was not quite a Kaspar Hauser, but nearly one.He was taken in by Jock and Ellen McIvor, Lachlan's aunt and uncle.Gemmy had jerking stammering fits.People wondered if he was a spy.He was white but had acquired a native look.

George Abbot, the schoolmaster of the settlement, is very young, but likes to pretend that he is older.Abbot hates the petty tyrannies of his job, hitting the students with a ruler.He had been a charming child, but as an adult he was plain.Alisdair Robertson, a relative, had helped George as a child.He was the person who had urged George to go teach at the settlement.George felt that he had come to a not very promising end.Gemmy tagged after the children when they went to school.George Abbot was the sort of person who tried to maintain his proficiency in French by practicing.

When Gemmy is seen speaking to two natives, he is considered to be disloyal and Jock McIvor's associates want him to leave the settlement.Jock seeks to resist mob action but as unexplained events begin to take place something has to happen to change Gemmy's circumstances.He is moved to the household of a bee keeper.Lachlan is surprised to learn that the school teacher is a visitor there, a place where two rather cultured women live.

The minister, Frazier, sees that Gemmy is caught between two worlds and that he is a figure of the future.Gemmy had been a ratcatcher's helper.He had loved the ratcatcher.Smelling a piece of wood in furniture at his new abode with the bee keeper, memory of his past is triggered.After being a ratcatcher's boy, he was at sea for two or three years until he became a castaway.Lachlan, in manhood a politician, feels that Gemmy's presence has remained with him for his whole life.

This novel is a part of the wonderful and growing literature of the British diaspora.

Remembering Gemmy
"One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast, three children were playing at the edge of a paddock when they say something extraordinary." So begins David Malouf's poetic novel "Remembering Babylon," a tale based on the true historical character named Gemmy Morril. The fictionalized Gemmy Fairley is the "something extraordinary" the three children, sisters Janet and Meg McIvor, and their cousin Lachlan Beattie find and later provide shelter for at the McIvor farm home. Gemmy is twenty-nine years old; sixteen years earlier he was thrown overboard from a British ship and has since been living with the aborigines.

Upon being threatened by a stick made to appear as a gun by Lachlan, Gemmy spits out, "Do not shoot, I am a B-b-british object." How apropos those words turn out to be as the town treats Gemmy more like a carefully watched dangerous animal than the prodigal son. Malouf is a native of Australia, but his mixed ancestry (mother is of Portuguese Jewish descent, father is Lebanese Christian) has surely prompted him to explore identity. One running theme and fear is losing one's whiteness. "Poor bugger, he had got lost, and as just a bairn too. It was a duty they owed to what they were, or claimed to be, to bring him back, if it was feasible, to being a white man. But was it feasible? He had been with them, quite happily it appeared, for more than half his life: living off the land, learning their lingo and all their secrets, all the abominations they went in for. Were they actually looking at a man, a white man?"

At times Malouf's writing jumps too quickly from different vantage points such as the schoolteacher George Abbot; Jock and Janet McIvor, who protect and treat Gemmy fairly; Mr. Frazer, the minister; and other smaller side characters. But after regaining one's bearings, the reader will step into a rhythm and word choice that befits a well-crafted poem. Malouf earned his writing chops via poetry ("Bicycle and Other Poems," 1970); "Remembering Babylon" sparkles with visual imagery thanks to the author's writing foundation of poetry. Happily the ending does not fall into maudlin sentimentality or cliché. However, one perhaps would have like to read and delve into knowing Gemmy more. Nonetheless, Malouf's "Remembering Babylon" is a powerful look at what happens when one encounters the "other."

Bohdan Kot ... Read more

Product Description
Exiled from imperial Rome to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea, Ovid, the irreverent Roman poet, encounters a feral child, who teaches him the language of nature. Reprint. 10,000 first printing. NYT. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Beautiful and thought provoking
This book was captivating, beautifully written and imaginative. It altered my thinking. This is the best short novel I have read and I love to read. Buy this little gem and take the journey. Savor it, because when it ends, you will wish for more.

Where's Ovid?
I have to disagree with the complimentary reviews here. Malouf's poetic dreamscape has little or nothing to do with the poet Ovid. You get so lost in Malouf's vague stream-of-consciousness imagery you lose all track of who's telling the story, or why. I started to wonder about a third of the way through why the writer built this 'novel' around any particular historical character. Never read Malouf before -- not likely to read him again.

Tristia and Metamorphosis
In 8 CE, the Latin poet Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea (the present-day Constanta in Romania) where he lived out the remainder of his life -- a life that David Malouf has reinterpreted in his extraordinary novel. I have a strong recollection from school of the pervasive melancholy of the poems he wrote there, his TRISTIA (sorrows), and Malouf has perfectly captured the mood of a bleak existence among a barbarian people. But that is only how the book starts; gradually the novel takes the poet from sad despair to another state of mind entirely. Malouf calls upon the spirit of Ovid's most famous work, the METAMORPHOSES. And not the flamboyant transformations such as the various disguises of amorous Jupiter that so appealed to us as eighth-graders, but the gentler changes such as that of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis who take root as trees growing in their beloved countryside. In Malouf's telling, a concept that meant nothing to me as a boy now moves me almost to tears as an older man.

"We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become." The theme of metamorphosis is introduced early, with a magnificent evocation of spring, all starting from a single poppy. "Scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off-childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind." Malouf, like the poet, is a magician with words. But words can also get in the way: "my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my BEING the sky" [emphasis mine]. Prevents him being part of the world of "wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them."

Malouf's greatest stroke of genius is to introduce a wild boy: a human child, raised among deer and wolves, a naked figure occasionally spotted on hunting trips, eventually captured and brought into the village. Ovid makes him his special charge, teaching him the rudiments of speech, but also learning from him his non-verbal understanding of the land and its creatures. Although Ovid has the support of the village headman, there are forces ranged against his protégé who regard him as a predatory spirit from the alien world, and when illness strikes the village the tensions rise unbearably. Eventually the old poet and young boy set off on a journey into an unknown that he finds has been known ever since childhood. The Child's trasformation at the end of the book is every bit as beautiful as Thomas Mann's shimmering vision of the boy Tadziu at the close of DEATH IN VENICE.

I came upon Malouf some years ago, trying to get a better knowledge of Australian literature. I was fascinated by THE GREAT WORLD and FLY AWAY PETER, but held off from this book as having nothing to do with the Australian experience. How wrong I was! For the experience of coming to a strange land in punishment as an exile is exactly that of most of the original settlers. So is the encounter with a less "civilized" people; even this rough frontier community has to erect battlements against the predations of still more barbarous peoples beyond the walls -- a colonial experience reflected in books like WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by JM Coetzee (albeit writing from South Africa at this point). But tentative connections can still be made; the sequence of teaching the Child to speak, for example, is very similar to what Kate Grenville would later describe with aboriginals in THE LIEUTENANT. And what is Ovid's exodus in the final part of the book but a journey into the outback such as that of the title character of Patrick White's VOSS, the greatest of all Australian novels?

I keep a list of the two dozen best novels I have ever read in my life. I don't care what has to bumped to make room -- even Malouf's more recent classical retelling, RANSOM -- but AN IMAGINARY LIFE will certainly be on it.

What It Means To Be Civlized
David Malouf's amazing little 154-page masterpiece, "An Imaginary Life" raises important, thoughtful and beautiful questions about what it means to be a civilized human being. Human existence may, after all, transcend i-phones, online banking, overnight flights to Europe, BBQs, "green" cleaning supplies, and the Super Bowl --- or even an Impressionist painting.

Putting himself in the brain and body of Ovid, the acclaimed Roman poet (43 BCE to 17 or 18 CE, died at age 75), Malouf brings Ovid to life as a man during his exile years in Tomis (in what is now the Black Sea coast of present day Romania - then, the outer fringes of the known world -- known to the Romans, that is). Emperor Augustus banished him, and Ovid never returned to Rome.

Ovid's struggles to become a member of the native and very primitive society in whose village he lives is a huge struggle for him. But, Ovid's finding, "capturing," befriending and teaching the found wild Child (who was completely uncivilized) to speak and communicate with other humans is the core of the story line, while the heart of the tale is in Ovid's finding himself and realizing what his life has been all about.Thus, Malouf informs on two important life questions: how am I to become "civilized," and what does my life mean?

Anyone with children of their own should read this book. In its few pages it teaches volumes about what educational psychologists try to impart in their heady, thick doctoral dissertations and vast books on human learning. Learning to communicate is difficult and frustrating no matter who or what you are. For the wild Child and Ovid, it is a thrilling, heart-wrenching and monumentally successful experience.

The written language is superb, a delight to read.Page 93-94 (speaking of the 11 year old wild child when they are out on their walks in the raw natural world) Ovid says, "All this world is alive for him. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read. It is his consciousness that he leads me through on our walks. It flickers all around us: it is water swamps, grass clumps, logs, branches; it is crowded with a thousand changing forms that shrill and sing and rattle and buzz, and must be, in his mind, like the poems I have long since committed to memory .... He leads me into his consciousness and it is there underfoot and all about me. How can I ever lead him into mine?" This is the age-old and completely normal dilemma for all parents of small children.

What is striking about Malouf's Ovid is his apparently correct interpretation of Ovid as a questioning, observing human being. Ovid did not "believe in" any of Rome's (or any others') Gods. Thus, the book, while greatly honoring the natural world, never devolves into some sort of religious interpretation.The world just "is." Ovid (Malouf) merely admires it and experiences it as a marvel. Malouf deserves our praise for his allowing the world to be in its natural way.

Clearly it is a 5++ on Amazon's rating scale. It's a brilliant and beautiful book.

Exquisite mythmaking
Ovid, exiled to live among "barbarians" who do not speak his language or know his gods, glimpses a feral child while hunting with his hosts. His determination to bring in the child starts the inevitable process of his own death. Suspenseful and troubling, this allegory could be lost in the workings of its own poetic language, but it works beautifully as a novel. Every character is real and deep, from Ryzak, the old man and putative leader of the village of huts, to the Child, a boy who embodies the physical world of earth, sky, plant and animal. Malouf does a fantastic job of conveying the society in which the pampered, intellectual Ovid finds himself, a society that prizes masculine strength and rugged endurance, but bows secretly to the older magic of women. The novel is one of awakening and evolution in the physical, emotional and spiritual planes.

Very highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy - here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate. A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer's life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock.Malouf's men and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life, puzzling over the space they'll leave behind when the waters close over them...This is a heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Evocative cover: masterfull stories
David Malouf has accompanied most of my adult reading life. The early fiction from,'Johnno' 'The Great World', and the wonderful,'Remembering Babylon', plus a few volumes of poetry, 'First Things' and 'Wild Lemons' I've stumbled upon rather than sought out...satisfying in the most without an adrenalin rush. So then is it a reflection on our accumulated wisdom that this collection of absolute stunners will have me hooked to whatever he publishes from hereon? I can't remember better stories anywhere; the coming of age perceptions in, Valley of Lagoons, the title tale,the Vietnam era's,'War Baby', and the comically sad regression of an old woman accompanying her 43 yr old son on a pilgrimage to Uluru. Alice Munro, Grace Paley, William Trevor, make way on my shelves. ... Read more

Product Description
From the author of "Remembering Babylon"--a novel of mysterious power that explores the gulf between fate and justice, duty and compassion. In Australia in 1827, two men--an illiterate Irish convict, sentenced to hang at dawn and the soldier who must supervise the deed--talk through the night. Out of their conversations, Malouf creates what is at once a mystery and a poetic meditation on the themes that occupy the silent center of our lives.Amazon.com Review
It is only natural for our eyes to wander into thecircumstances of others and either count our blessings or rail at theinjustice of fate. How we deal with the fate dealt us is the subjectof David Malouf's shadowy novel. Having grown up in the samehousehold, but under different circumstances, two foster-brothersrespond to fate in radically different ways and with radicallydifferent results. While one takes kismet under his horsewhip, theother dares not rebel. This haunting replay of Greek tragedy willreverberate in your mind long after the last page is turned, for aswith these men, fate is our habitat. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

David Malouf
I am not going to give you a summary of the book, but it does have very good plot and detailed characters.The book describes characters through flashbacks on their past and what they've had to deal with in the past.I usual like a book with a little more actual conversations and I did find it confusing at time when flashbacks became reality again.I did the author did a good job showing the emotions of each character, you could easily which character was the angry one, the friendly one, and so on and so forth.Overall it wasn't my favorite book just because the dialogue was weak but it is a good read.

A night of memories
Michael Adair is far from his native Ireland. In the scrub of New South Wales, he's been assigned the supervising of the execution of a bushranger. With no priest present, Adair undertakes the task of providing company, if not consolation, for the doomed raider. Carney, an Irishman like Adair, was a member of a gang led by a renowned leader, Dolan. Dolan, famous for his physical stature and cunning, is of particular interest to Adair. The last survivor of the mob, Carney seeks some level of absolution for his sins, which appear minimal. Frontier justice is always grim and Carney expects no favours from his watcher.

As the night progresses, Adair's mind drifts back to his childhood in Ireland. An orphan taken in by a comfortable, if troubled, family, he reflects on his foster parents' son. From early days when Adair was caregiver to Fergus to later, more competitive times, the relationship of the two boys was close. It became strained only as they achieved maturity and Virgilia, a neighbour, becomes a tutor to the pair. Carney, it appears, may be a link to that distant past. A link less remote and vague than the circumstances of the lonely night suggest. Reminiscing may lead to connections both men may not welcome, yet each reaches tentatively for the other regardless of the outcome. The dynamics of this tale are intense and compelling.

In Australia, there's a long-standing tradition of the "bush ballad" - a mix of fable, poetry and music. The ballads reflect the stark, unforgiving land and the lives of the people coping with it. The verses are wistful with longing for better times and places, yet reflect the "battler's" striving to overcome adversity. Malouf's prose reflects that tradition in both style and content. He's parsimonious with words, yet precise and vividly descriptive. He's presented us with a story of profound depth and wide-reaching scope, yet managed it within an astonishing few pages. No words are wasted, but each conveys the fullest meaning within the story. Malouf is a masterful writer, and this book will long stand as a sterling example of his abilities. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Fade To Gray
David Malouf is not only a novelist, but a published poet as well. His work, "The Conversations At Curlow Creek", contain passages that could stand alone as solitary poems with little change to their form. This is only the third work of his I have read, so even if combined with the fourth I am reading, I still feel this Author's range is remarkable. Australia is not a place where the word confine would seem to be appropriate, however with this story Mr. Malouf creates a very intimate setting that even when expanded, rarely grows larger.

As he has done before he brings people from Scotland, or Ireland and tells his story in Australia. When I said he expands the setting without literally enlarging it as well, I meant that his players might roam their memories and share those of others, while remaining all but immobile during the tale. Two men from Ireland share an evening. One represents the authority of law in its most final form, the other a man whose outlaw life should hold values in complete opposition to his jailer. An then there is a third man, also from Ireland, raised as a brother to the lawman, and the possible leader of the group the prisoner is the only surviving member of.

The night can be a strange time for thoughts and memories, and when one of the men is supposed to be hung at dawn, every minute is arguably critical. The passage of time seems to obsess the jailer more. When asked the time he wonders if he should just say the half hour, or the actual 28 minutes past. He contemplates the value these 2 additional minutes would mean to the condemned. He uses time to gain information about this man's leader, probing to see if the man is his foster brother last seen when 16 years of age. The jailer sensitive to the man's diminishing time is desperate for the knowledge, but becomes increasingly respectful of the convict.

The travels outside the room they share often read as a recollection, until the waking of the dreamer disturbs the memory. It's a more subtle form of recall than just turning the page and finding you are jumping back and forth between dates. As the night passes the ides of forgiveness, redemption, and morality are discussed with the jailor playing the reluctant philosopher/priest. Mr. Malouf is very clever in taking issues that seem so black and white, and making them gray. He examines the two paths in life these men have followed, and the possible life of the third man. All three are very different, but two may have decided to live outside the confines of society's laws, while the third became a custodian of the same society's structure.

The book comes to an ending that I doubt many will find expected, and some may argue is ambiguous. Mr. Malouf leaves a great deal of room for his readers to either find the thread he leaves, or to allow space to be filled by the reader. His writing is unique and compelling, and will either hold great appeal, or certain frustration for readers.

A moral masterpiece
This is one of my all time valued books. A splended writer, Malouf uses language as a poet, brings his two main characters to vivid life, makes the reader care about both of them...the convict and the soldier (possibly hisexecutioner). What particularly moved me and sets this book above most ishow skillfully Malouf raises the question of morality (without moralizing)relative to the judgement of others...Who is not guilty? Or if guilty, whatabout the compassion of another.These are to me primary questions in aworldwhere finger-pointing is so prevalent.Malouf is a man whose breadthand depth of insight deserve much attention and applause.

Thought-provoking
The suspense of the novel is provided by the reader's wondering if Adairwill hang an illiterate Irish convict at dawn or if he will yield tocompassion after talking and reminiscing with the man through the night. The convict relates a story about a time that he was given a job toimpersonate someone under very mysterious circumstances which turned out tobe the only instance in the man's life that he was ever treated with anykind of tenderness.This story is marvelously told and does arouse thereader's sympathy. Soldier and convict are united by their Irishbackgrounds and the fact that they were both orphans whose fortunes,however, were widely divergent. The reader comes to wonder which positionis more difficult: the convict's necessity of facing death at dawn or thesoldier's duty to be the executioner.The author uses this situation as afocus for a meditation on mortality that is philosophical and sometimesmysterious. This would be a good selection for a book group as multipleinterpretations of the meaning of the book are certainly possible. ... Read more

Product Description
For the two men in this novel, war was supposed to be a testing ground. But it proved to be an ordeal of a different kind. Spanning 70 years of Australian life, from Sydney's Cross to the backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, this is a novel of lost innocence and witness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

The Great Word.
I found the author's writing profound and in-depth.An exceptional writer.The book is disturbing and I can not explain why..perhaps it is so human.The feel of the Australian world. The episodes of POW march powerful.I had heard of the death marches executed by the Japanese.The reality of the war and what it does to men in the military.I am anxious to read more books from this Author.He is on the top of my list.

That Other History
Towards the end of David Malouf's epic novel spanning most of 20th-century history in Australia, an unnamed character speaks in a eulogy of "all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter." In telling the stories of two men who meet in a Japanese prison camp in WW2 then go their mostly separate ways, one achieving riches, the other remaining obscure, Malouf comes as close to capturing that other history as any writer could.

I have not yet read much of the literature of Australia, only Malouf's own FLY AWAY PETER and Patrick White's incandescent RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT, but I do begin to catch glimpses of the national myth. Part has to do with the land itself, a vast wild beauty lost to urbanization and neglect. Part has to do with people: the rough Australian spirit and the ease of passage from poverty to a sort of gentility and back again. Common to both (as the book jacket so accurately puts it) is the loss of innocence. And yet the quality that so caught me up in the White book and both surprised and delighted me in this one, is a visionary penetration that looks beneath surfaces and finds wonder. Most of the big events happen in the first half of this book, yet in the fifty-year span of the second half, as lives settle into patterns, the depth of meaning keeps increasing until the final pages are as rich as anything I can think of.

True, the novel does not begin promisingly. The paperback edition has an ugly cover and sharp-edged pages that cut the fingers. The opening chapter, much of it in dialect, is set outside a broken-down country store and features a simple-minded woman watching two old geezers fishing. The woman soon fades from the picture, but the book takes us back through the lives of these two men, Digger Keen and Vic Curran. Both begin in similar rural poverty. Both enlist at the outbreak of war, both are captured in the fall of Singapore (an event also narrated in JG Farrell's magnificent THE SINGAPORE GRIP), and both endure over three years of terrible captivity. Yet they are different in personality and start more as enemies than friends, attracted as much by their differences as their similarities. After the war, Vic becomes a successful entrepreneur, while Digger returns to his country outpost; the contrast between them allows Malouf a subtle examination of what is truly important in individual lives. Vic's story is the more familiar one of outward success masking an inner emptiness, but Malouf gives him unexpected pockets of sympathy. Even more remarkable is Digger, who comes to embody a depth of philosophical, even poetic, understanding that for me is the greatest joy of this wonderful book.

slow
The Great World engaged me in the beginning and through the war, then seemed to drag on to a slow, boring end.Perhaps that's the point of the book, how war dries up life from life in those who survive it.

An indelible impression
I read this bbok while in my early twenties and naive to so many of the horrors of war. It had a profound impact on me. Ten years later, after spending the first two years of her life in India, my daughter was gravely ill. My recollections of this book and the Cholera symptoms that Malouf described in his characters... prompted me to confront the Dr's with my fear. I was correct, she had Cholera. The vivid descriptions of what those men must have suffered during those times had never left me, and Malouf's clarity and attention to detail in his writing saved my daughters life. A life changing read for me!

Great story and great storytelling
David Malouf is a masterful storyteller. His multiple award winning novel, "The Great World",is a coming-of-age tale of lost innocence of two lads (Digger and Vic) whose separate childhoods in the outbacks of Australia and their shared experiences as interns in the Second World War helped shape the course of their future together. It's difficult to characterise the relationship these two men have with each other. To call it friendship would be to simultaneously overstate and understate the position. They were never really buddies - hell, Digger didn't even like Vic - but fate had different ideas and kept intervening at critical moments to draw them together whenever their lives took separate turns after the war. Of the two, Vic is the more colourful and vividly drawn character.The early rejection of his natural father - a weak and sorry piece of low life - and his obsessive need for self determination provide more than a clue to our impression of him as a steely hearted "user" (of Digger, his adoptive family, etc) of family and friends for his own ends. The sad irony is that Vic is as much a victim as the people he uses and only his wife, Ellie, is privileged and burdened by knowledge of the truth when she catches a glimpse of his real self in the dark. More disappointment follows when his son Greg turns out to be a sloganeering liberal. Digger, on the other hand, is arguably the novel's moral centre but as a character, he seems curiously underwritten. His part is that of the moon to Vic's sun. He possesses a vulnerability that is simply incandescent. Even Jenny, his retarded sister, sees through Vic, but Digger remains trusting and accepting to the end. But "The Great World" is far from a two man show. There are loads more characters that Malouf creates who are truly memorable. Mac, their war time mate, may have been given limited script space, but his spirit lives on long after he has been written out.It's also a wonderfully uplifting moment for the reader whenPa and Ma, Vic's adoptive parents, find their true vocation in life as poet and businesswoman, respectively. Malouf is a classic writer in the best of the old fashioned tradition. He knows how to tell a story and keep you enthralled from start to finish. His prose is warm, accessible and true. Reading "The Great World" may not change your life but it will show you what it is to be human. A great novel. I highly recommend it. ... Read more

Product Description
In this stunning collection, internationally acclaimed writer David Malouf gives us bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse. These are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent. Malouf writes about men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.

This single volume gathers both a new collection of Malouf's short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Yes, a master writer, but often just plain boring.
There's an assurance to Malouf's writing. He knows he's good. It's not in question. He knows he's got profound insight into the human condition. Also not in question. There's so much to applaud about this great Australian writer, but the assurance means the writing also lacks the desperation to impel a story along, or the hunger thatcould give it a cutting edge. He's the kind of writer that knows how to produce flawless pieces, but doesn't know when he's being boring. As an Australian I love his Australianess, and for those of you wanting to know more about this paradise down here (I'm being only half ironic) there's no place better to go. I just wish 'he' didn't think he was so good. Read his Novella 'An Imaginary Life', if you want to see him at his best. A masterpiece, pure and simple. These stories just make me want to read that again.

So moving only read one at a time
Malouf's stories are so quietly intense you can be breathless at any ending.Savor each with a long pause in between.I used the library but need my own copy! ... Read more

Product Description
Brought back to Australia by the death of his father, Dante is sorting through his father's belonging when he comes across a photograph of Johnno, a long-time friend. The photograph stirs up a lifetime of memories for Dante, leading him to finally set Johnno's story--which has haunted him for years--on paper. An outrageous character of legendary proportions, Johnno is brought top life in all his complexity, beginning with his days at Brisbane Grammar School, when he and Dante first become friends, to the days they spend together in Paris, Johnno's inexplicable rages and periodic transformations are recounted until we come to know him--without ever quite understanding him. Daring, impossible, and unpredictable, Johnno is a fascinating character. His shocking behavior awes some, annoys others, and provokes a good many more. Above all, though, he is thoroughly unforgettable. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Wonderful
In less than two-hundred pages, Malouf manages to capture the coming-of-age angst of the entire Australian post-war generation. Only Malouf could be telling the story of two youths and, virtually on the same page, effortlessly synthesize the realities of Australian experience with European philosophical themes, and connect them both to the whole tangled mess of our national identity. And yet for all its efficiency and high intent, 'Johnno' still reads like an affectionate and deeply-felt memoir, never shying away from the emotional, physical and sexual confusion of youth, nor from the contradictions inherent in what it means to be an 'Australian man'. But that's the genius of Malouf, and it's something we find him doing again and again: telling an apparently simple story about ordinary people, yet with this richly poetic, philosophical undercurrent which can suddenly reach up and pull you under. For Australian readers, this is a particularly important skill. Not only does Malouf deal with significant human issues, but he brings them home. He takes them out of the realm of abstract philosophy and makes them implicit in this place.This makes his work at once deeply personal and resolutely public in the best sense: he has something to share with all of us, something important, and he shares it beautifully.

Slow Moving, but Worth It
It took me a while to get through Johnno, despite its less than 200 pages, but I must say I thoroughly enjoyed each page.The slowness was more a function of my available time than of the novel's quality.Johnno is a little gem, a wonderful chronicling of a young man's coming of age, and his relationship with Johnno, a slightly troubled young man, in Brisbane right after World War II.David Malouf is a wonderful writer.Each sentence is a work of art--but nothing is too precious, too anything.It's an enjoyable book that I highly recommend.

Bloody good
I read this book in 1997, having avoided studying it a dozen years earlier in school.Since leaving school I had inexplicably held out on reading what is regarded as the best work of fiction set in and about my home town of Brisbane.Once I started reading I could not stop.In amongst thebeautiful prose and vivid description lies Johnno, a character we all know,love, loathe, and long for.

An excellent book.As it turns out I'm gladI held out until I was old enough to really appreciate David Malouf'sstyle, which is rich, evocative and so very (tempted to say 'real', butthis is fiction) believable. ... Read more

Product Description
In this shimmering work of imagination, one of Australia's most honored writers conjures a single still moment on the edge of the 20th century in which two unlikely people share a friendship. When Ashley Crowther returns to Australia to manage his father's property, he discovers a timeless landscape of kingfishers and ibises; he also meets Jim Saddler, the young woodsman who becomes Ashley's guide to his inheritance. Together they discard the differences of personality and class to enter a partnership of wonder. But when war breaks out in Europe, Jim and Ashley are drawn into obscene enterprise of the trenches, where death falls from the sky and burrows out of the earth. In telling the story of these men, Fly Away Peter combines overwhelmingly sensual imagery with an unblinking consciousness of the worst that history can inflict to produce a novel of phosphorescent beauty. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Bird's eye view
This is an exquisite little novella that begins in beauty on the coast of Queensland and ends (almost) in the mud of Flanders on the other side of the world. Birds, of course, make similar migrations; this is one of the things that fascinates 20-year-old Jim Saddler as he studies birds with borrowed binoculars, noting their species, their habits, their comings and goings. He strikes up a friendship with Ashley Crowther, the young owner of this stretch of Australian farmland, and also with Imogen Harcourt, a middle-aged photographer with a similar passion. But then the 1914 War breaks out, and Jim and Ashley sign up, in different regiments and at different ranks.

There are many books about the Western Front. The ingredients are all much the same: boredom, companionship, carnage. What makes one stand out from another is the quality of the writing, the particular point of view, and whatever aspects of normal life the author chooses to set against the obscenity of war. The last book I read about the trenches, for example, Sebastian Barry's A LONG LONG WAY, was written with a rich Irish poetry, kept its point of view very much at ground level, and set the War against the very different Irish fight for independence back home. Malouf's writing is also poetic, but simpler, and he excels particularly at describing the air above and the land behind the war, as in the following:

"Often, as Jim later discovered, you entered the war through an ordinary looking gap in a hedge. One minute you were in a ploughed field, with snowy troughs between ridges that marked old furrows and peasants off at the edge of it digging turnips or winter greens, and the next you were through the hedge and on duckboards, and although you could look back and still see the farmers at work, or sullenly watching as the soldiers passed over their land and went slowly below ground, there was all the difference in the world between your state and theirs. They were in a field and very nearly at home. You were in the trench system that led to the war."

But it is Malouf's juxtaposition of the battlefield to the Australian nature reserve that is so daring. For there is no possibility of a literal resolution that connects them. Indeed, Malouf seems to avoid following narrative links; Ashley and Jim barely meet again, and the biplane so prominently featured on the cover ultimately serves only to offer Jim a metaphor for his own bird's eye view on life. Yet it is an important metaphor. The two halves of the book portray beauty and destruction with memorable power. But the coherence of the novel as a whole depends upon the final chapter, which returns to Imogen Harcourt watching the birds among the sand dunes. I had to sleep on this and re-read it for it to fully work, but now I see the beauty in her simple understanding of the life that connects both birds and man.

Other Books
A novel about the horrors of running around on the battlefield during world war one, in the main.Unforunately, it is also a very dull example of the same.

The good thing then in that respect, is that it is also quite short so you don't have to put up with it for every long.

One of the few books that made me cry
Malouf deals with big themes here: the continuities of nature; the horror of human conflict; our desire to hold onto the past, and the necessity of relinquishing it.But he handles them in such a personal, beautiful and profoundly moving way that he manages to say it all in under 150 pages.Some readers might prefer more languorous pacing, but Malouf has no reason to stall.Unlike many writers, he knows precisely what he's doing.His precision is utterly astounding.He can say more, move you more, in a dozen pages than lesser writers seem to manage in whole careers.Chapter 14, scarcely more than 2000 words, is the most powerful account of the Great War - what it meant, what it can be made to mean - that I have ever read.

The simplicity of life and the complexity of war
David Malouf's prize winning novel, 'Fly Away Peter' is a beautifully written story that both beautifies and simplifies the life of humans and animals. Malouf has to be considered as one of Australia's leading writers and poets. This novel is not a story to be read if one is after light entertainment. It is truly the work of a poet, a fine piece of literature. His descriptive text beckons the reader to find a deeper meaning. The simple messages of love, friendship and the beauty of life are both refreshing and moving. Do not attempt to read it if you are after cheap thrills. This book needs to be savoured. It follows the lives of three main characters, Ashley, Jim and Imogen. Together they appreciate the joyous beauty of nature by studying and photographing a sanctuary owned by Ashley. However the terror of war rips the paradise apart and leaves the three friends seperated and questioning the meaning of life. Through different experiences, each character comes to a similar conclusion, that life is simple, beautiful and a gift to be enjoyed. It will go on over any hurdles. There are always survivors. An interesting read if you are having difficulties facing each day.

Mores Pages Or Less Material
I have read most of Mr. Malouf's novels and he is an Author of remarkable talent and consistency. It has generally not been whether a given work is good, just how very good it is. He almost competes with himself alone when he pens another work. This work, "Fly Away Peter", is closer to a novella in length, but felt a bit crowded when read. It would seem examining an issue in depth, or a general theme in breadth can be accomplished without a regard for length, rather just skill. This time out I felt there was room for two or three times the length of the actual work.

This book promises to deal with the issue of men from different classes of life, how they place the strata of society aside and become partners. And then to narrate how the First World War draws the two different men into its maw. These men are not the only characters, and it is not just their histories the Author must communicate. When all of these aspects are brought together in barely 134 pages, it became incomplete for me, almost claustrophobic. Mr. Malouf is a remarkable writer and poet. To read any of his work is to read great literature from this admired Australian Author.

The four stars may seem to contradict what I have said, however I cannot go back and change all of the previous books of his I have commented upon. This is excellent reading when placed next to much of what is available; it only comes up short when compared to the balance of his work. It certainly is worth the time to read and enjoy, it should probably be placed at the beginning of reading his body of work, rather than near its end. ... Read more

Product Description
Talks about how the following three authors address issues of identity and politics in their writings: the Canadian Michael Ondaatje, the Australian David Malouf, and the South African Nadine Gordimer. This book examines the alliance between postmodernism and postcolonial theory. ... Read more

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David Malouf is one of Australia's most popular novelists, and also one of its most elusive. Drawing on the whole range of his work, Indyk presents Malouf as both a primitive and a romantic--a writer who turns to the natural world for the expression of desires which are proscribed or not recognized in the social realm. Indyk's study takes the form of a long essay or meditation, which explores the hidden logic of Malouf's art--as fiction, poetry, essay, drama, libretto--revealing an underlying technique which works through emblem and analogy, releasing energies that might be inhibited by more direct forms of expression. This emblematic technique allows Malouf to probe the dark sides of desire, its relationship to violence, savagery, and even death, while on the other hand, it underwrites his moments of poetic illumination, as he strives toward a visionary apprehension of unity and belonging. ... Read more

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