1990

Fly Away Peter
David Malouf

Poetic is the word most often used to describe David Malouf’s work. He started out as a poet and has published five volumes to date. He also taught in the English department at Sydney University – so it is hardly surprising to find a `literariness’ in his work which stylistically takes the form of a verbal compression that can make the apparent simplicity of his writing not so much difficult to penetrate, but unaccountably opaque. On first reading Malouf is sometimes not easy and newcomers may find Fly Away Peter not to their taste. If teachers find students hesitant, they should encourage them to stay with it. It’s worth the time and attention.

While Malouf’s work has links with other novelists, comparisons with poets also suggest themselves. Blake for instance- in Auguries of Innocence:

To see the World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Fly Away Peter, like The Great World, Malouf’s latest work published in February this year, begins with the grain of sand and opens out on the world. Both novels are about Australian men, quiet rural blokes, who have a laconic affinity with the natural world. They are circumspect and outwardly unremarkable, but Malouf is interested in revealing (what many writers have regarded as a contradiction in terms !)an imaginative, spiritual dimension to the Aussie stereotype. Jim Saddler, like Digger in The Great World, has more to him than meets the eye. And like his counterparts in World War II, Jim’s world is enlarged (but not notably improved) by the Great War.

In Fly Away Peter, Malouf maps Jim and his environment in the zoological terms of habitat :

“He moved always on these two levels, through these two worlds: the flat world of individual grassblades, seen so close up that they blurred, where the ground-feeders darted about striking at worms, and the long view in which all this part of the country was laid out like a relief-map in the Shire Office- surf, beach, swampland, wet paddocks, dry forested hill-slopes, jagged blue peaks. Each section of it supported its own birdlife; the territorial borders of each kind were laid out there, invisible but clear, which the birds were free to cross but didn’t; they stayed for the most part within strict limits. They stayed. Then at last, when the time came, they upped and left; flew off in groups, or in couples or alone, to where they came from and lived in the other part of the year, far out over the earth’s rim in the Islands, or in China or Europe.” (pp.2-3, Penguin, 1983.)

It is like the world that opens up for the young Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait when the boy writes in his exercise book :

“Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.”

Except that Jim’s identity is designated by caste, he is a bird who stays within strict limits. This is a convenient constraint for him. He can live his life as though it is pre-ordained. But not for long. Migration is the other part of his destiny, which he will soon discover . The portents of this can be found in the separate universes of the Cambridge-educated Ashley Crowther who has been there and back, and Imogen Harcourt who has come to the end of the Earth to stay.

Malouf shows this world in rural Queensland as being almost edenic, at least, it is archaic and elemental – as when Jim takes Ashley through the swamps :

“He would push his pole into mud again, putting his shoulder into it and watching the birds flock away, and they would ride smoothly in under the boughs. Nobody spoke. It was the odd the way the place imposed itself and held them. Even Ashley Crowther, who preferred music, was silent here and didn’t fidget. He sat spell-bound. And maybe, Jim thought, this is music too, this sort of silence.

What he could not know was to how great a degree these trips into the swamp in something very like a punt, were for Ashley recreations of long, still afternoons on the Cam, but translated here not only to some other hemisphere, but back, far back, into some pre-classical, pre-historic, primaeval and haunted world… in which the birds Jim pointed out , and might almost have been calling up as he named them in whisper out of the mists before creation, were extravagantly disguised spirits of another order of existence..”

This is a intellectual reverie for Ashley but Jim seems to actually inhabit the world in these terms – something which Imogen and Ashley wonder at and envy.

Then, as it was to for a whole generation of insular, unworldly young men, the prospect of enlistment altered his future permanently. Jim is claimed by the State and the imperatives of Empire:

“When he stepped out of the shop with his new boots creaking and the old ones in a box under his arm he saw that the streets were, in fact, filled with an odd electricity, as if, while he was inside, a quick storm had come up and equally passed, changing the sky and setting the pavements, the window panes, the flanks of passing vehicles in new and more vivid light. They might have entered a different day, and he wondered if there really had been a change of weather or he only saw the change now because tht girl had planted some seed of excitement in him whose sudden blooming here in the open air cast its own reflection on things. He felt panicky. It was as if the ground before him, that had only minutes ago stretched away to a clear future, had suddenly tilted in the direction of Europe, in the direction of events, and they were all now on a dangerous slope. That was the impression gave him. That they were sliding. There was, in all this excitement, an alarming sense that they might be at the beginning of a stampede.” (pp.36-7)

Analogies can be found in Jim’s bird world :

“They were the days of the big migrations, those last days of August and early September, and Jim spent long hours observing and noting down new arrivals: the first refugees Miss Harcourt called them- a strange word, he wondered where she had heard it. he never had.” (p.43)

Even a new species is linked with places towards which he is inevitably heading:

“`Jim’, she said ,`it’s a dunlin. You couldn’t miss it. They used to come in thousands back home, all along the shore and in the marshes. Common as starlings.’
He took the glasses and stared at this rare creature he had never laid eyes on till yesterday that was as common as a starling.

`Dunlin’, he said.
And immediately on his lips it sounded different, and it wasn’t just the vowel. She could have laughed outright at the newness of the old word now it had arrived on this side of the globe, at its difference in his mouth and hers…

`Where does it come from ?’
‘Sweden. The Baltic, Iceland. Looks like another refugee.
He knew the word now. Just a few months after he had first heard it, it was common, you saw it in the papers every day.” (pp.47-8.)

The war had begun and again Jim is caught on the slide towards France:

“Jim felt the ground tilting, as he had felt it that first day in Brisbane, to the place where the war was, and felt the drag upon him of all those deaths. The time would come when he wouldn’t be able any longer to resist. he would slide with the rest. Down into the pit.”(P.55)

In England for training, and then in France, Jim becomes a cog in military life. He meets Clancy Parkett, a talisman for him, an alter ego, like Vic is to be for Digger in The Great World. The tenuous continuity of life, its capacity to be named and enumerated, remains with the ubiquitous birdlife:

“But more reassuring than all this- the places, the stories of a life that was continuous elsewhere-a kind of private reassurance for himself alone, was the presence of the birds, that allowed Jim to make a map in his head of how the parts of his life were connected, there and here, and to find his way back at times to a natural cycle of things that the birds still followed undisturbed.” (p.61)

For the first time in his life Jim sees himself as part of a society , no longer a solitary individual, an antipodean Greystoke, but a cipher in an unspecified Grand Plan :

“They were approaching the front. It was a new landscape now, newly developed for the promotion of the war. There were emergency roads everywhere, cutting across what must have once been vineyards or beet-fields, metalled for motor vehicles and guns…Everywhere along the way there were blacksmith shops and dumps for ammunition, guarded enclosures containing spools of cable and great wheels of barbed wire, duckboards, sandbags, planking, solid-beech slabs for the new style all-weather roads they were building further up…It was all in a state of intense activity. Things were being organised, you saw, on a large scale and with impressive expertise, as in the interests of an ambitious commercial project, the result of progress, efficiency and the increased potential of the age.” (p.68.)

It reminds Jim of a picture of the building of the pyramids in his Sunday school primer:

“the Pharaohs were cruel (if you looked closely you could see the overseers’ whips) and ungodly, and their project was monstrous. But Jim, seeing the thing perhaps from the wrong perspective, and with the eyes of another century, had been impressed, as he was now by the movement he saw all about him, vast numbers of men engaged in an endeavour that was clearly equal in scale to anything the Pharaohs had imagined and of which he, Jim Saddler, was about to become part.” (pp.68-9)

In the opening sentences of Chapter 12, Malouf captures the dreamy ordinariness of war and the almost fluorescent clarity that comes over a creature facing danger and death:

“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 the duckboards, and although you could look back and still see 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 a trench system which led to the war.” (p.76)

The description is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ poem from Pictures From Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus :

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.

Jim has a series of close encounters with death – Clancy is obliterated in a bomb blast, Wizzer ,another comrade, is paralysed by shell-shock and Bob Cleese has a slow grisly death from gas poisoning. The three grim fates of the war in France are presented in microcosmic detail. Jim, fatigued and nerve-worn moves close to existential crisis :

“What can stand, he asked himself, what can ever stand against it? A ploughed hillside with all the clods gleaming where the share had cut ? A keen eye for the difference, minute but actual, between two species of wren that spoke for a whole history of divergent lives ? Worth recording in all this. He no longer thought so. Nothing counted. The disintegrating power of that cruelty in metallic form, when it hurled itself against you, raised you aloft, thumped you down like a sack of grain, scattered you as bloody rain, or opened you up to its own infinite blackness- nothing stood before that. It was annihilating. It was all. (pp.104-5)

It is only the sight of an old man going about his ploughman’s business that helps Jim to get his bearings back:

“The old man, who did not acknowledge their presence, had taken up a hoe and preparing the earth in rows. It was the time for winter sowing, as any farmer among them would know, but it was a measure of the strangeness of all things here, of the inversion of all that was normal, that they saw immediately from what he was doing that the man was crazy. One of the fellows called out to him but he did not look up
…Shortly after that, to keep hold of himself and of the old life that he had come close to losing, he went back to his notes. Even here, in the thick of the fighting, there were birds. The need to record their presence imposed itself on him like a kind of duty.” (pp.106-7)

With grim precision Malouf descibes Jim’s progress towards extinction. It is a grim narrative as the author leads us deeper and deeper into the soldier’s lucid but fragile consciousness. At the moment he is hit he experiences in Blakean detail the natural life around him, observing himself outside himself, part of a landcape of killing but also of rats, woodlice, birds and ears of wheat – the notion of enumerator and map-maker is used again:

“He continued to run astonished that he could hold all this in his head at the same time and how the map he carried there had so immensely expanded.” (p.117)

He experiences his mortal wounding as being like atoms
disintegrating:

“He felt the whole process, a coarsening of the grains out of which his flesh was composed, and their gradual loosening and falling away, as first his hand dissolved, then his arm, then his shoulder. If things went on like this there would be nothing left for the bearers to find.” (p.119)

Jim hallucinates that Ashley has come to help him out of the casualty tent though this, and the fact of his death, is not apparent to the reader until he describes a reunion with Clancy and Bob Cleese and his return to familiar ground :

“It was a clearing, quite large, and Jim thought he had been there before. And he had, he had ! It was the place where he had gone with the others to collect firewood and seen the old man digging. .. he was surprised to see how thick the woods were, how the blasted trees had renewed themselves with summer growth, covering their wounds, and were turning colour now the autumn had come, and stripping. There were thick drifts underfoot. They crackled. A few last birds were singing: two thrushes and further off somewhere, a chaffinch.” (p.126)

In the concluding chapters the point of view shifts back to Imogen Harcourt, who like Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse, registers the changes and the loss- looking again at her photograph of the sandpiper as though it had been fixed not by a lens on film but by Jim’s acute perception and attention:

“That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature. To set nothing above it, birth, position, talent even, was to deny to all but a few among the infinite millions what was common and what was real, and what was also, in the end, most moving. A life wasn’t for anything. It simply was. ” (p.132)

This perilously banal observation- that a life is, until it simply ceases- is the centre of Malouf’s novel. It is powerfully simple and registers the finality of death in terms that the reader actually experiences.

David Malouf is fascinated by the very fact of consciousness and memory. In The Great World, the men in Changi prison recall lists of facts, details, geographical reconstructions, bus routes, erotic encounters, anything that will confirm their existence- I remember therefore I am. Similarly the naming of things is crucial to Ovid, poet in exile in An Imaginary Life and the listing of phenomena is Jim Saddler’s way of reconstructing amidst chaos and destruction. The patterns of history are another matter. Jim cannot stop the slide to Europe- his migration to extinction. Like the two little dicky birds in the skipping rhyme- fly away Peter, fly away Paul, come back Peter, come back Paul- Jim and Ashley, migrators and returners, depart together but only one returns. Jim Saddler is an innocent abroad, who though gifted with instinctive imagination, is still not protected by this state of grace. Knowing and valuing what he does, he has no comprehension what it means to be working for the Pharaoh.

Murray Bramwell

“Maps of Migration: David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, (In G.Tulloch and A.Greet (eds), Making Connections- Introducing texts for Senior English Studies) CRNLE/SAETA Publication, 1990, pp.66-72.