1990

The Great World
David Malouf
Chatto and Windus

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Memories and the past have often been at the centre of David Malouf’s fiction- in his first novel Johnno, in the tellingly named An Imaginary Life, especially in the scrupulously recalled chambers of 12 Edmondstone Street and now in his most recent work, The Great World. The capacity to remember is more than nostalgic impulse for Malouf, it is the power to reconstitute and sustain glimpses from the edge of comprehension, fractured wisdom, past revelations essential to the present because, without them, life is a nameless grief.

But if, as in The Great World, it is a nightmare that is being reconstructed, the encounter with things past while a necessity is also a terror. The Great World is about two men, one from a patch of ground up on the Hawkesbury, the other from a tatty coastal town up the coast from Sydney. Generically named Digger and Vic their lives begin in the twenties, harden in the difficult thirties and reach apotheosis in the wartime forties.

Drawing on documentary sources of the Burma campaign, Weary Dunlop and others, Malouf centres his novel on the privations of the infamous Changi prison camp. There the paths of his two characters meet and there they are changed utterly by events and circumstances too inimical to sense and reason to be incorporated into ordinary life . Moving from the narrow colonial perimeters of an unfulfilled Australia, Digger and Vic are pitched into the Great World only to find it demonic. This novel is about the inner life of two men from a society that denied such a notion, especially in a bloke.

But Malouf is not writing an historical work, the kind of replica that say Thomas Keneally might produce. The Great World is very much about the present but in doing so it investigates the effect of the Second World War on men who ran business and government in the sixties and still do in the Australian gerontocracy.

Malouf, often alarmingly, reminds the reader of the link between the past and the everyday, as when he describes Vic visiting Digger on the farm- “Sitting quietly now with his head back, he saw from outside him, above and at a distance , these two old blokes sitting at ease beside a river, and it seemed miraculous to him that one of them, against all the odds, should be himself. Miraculous, too – there is no other word for it-that this breath should be here for him to catch hold of, and that this moment, just after four on an autumn morning in 1987, should have been waiting up ahead for them to reach it..”

Life inside the prison is described in the same terms as others have depicted the European death camps, with the grim arithmetic of individual survival – “Transactions. Deals. They took up so much energy, engendered so much feeling, you might have thought that they were the one true essential of a fighting man’s life, of tenacious, disorderly civilian life inside the official military one, exposing in pocket form the real motives of all this international activity, compared with which all talk of freedom and honour and patriotic pride and the saving of civilisation was the merest mind-fogging gibberish.”

The cruelty and disease of Changi has been eloquently documented by prisoners in memoirs, by photographers and later,powerfully by writers such as John Romeril in The Floating World. David Malouf is economic in his notation and the more harrowing in doing so. In particular he focuses on the strategies for survival – Vic wolfing an extra bowl of rice in front of Digger, delerious with malaria, but then,later, dragging him into a stream to get the tiddlers to chew the gangrenous flesh off his ulcerated leg.

Vic inhabits the here and now, completely focused on the next bid for advantage while Digger travels like a shaman to other realms as when his friend Mac describes his house in Sydney and he visualises it room by room -“In the dark while the house slept, he waited quietly in the kitchen, his spirit touched by the light off those plates, in his hands the dryness of a bit of stale bread…Once, standing there he heard a movement behind him and Iris came in in her nightgown. She didn’t see him of course. She walked right past him to a sink, took a glass, filled it with water from the tap and drank, very slowly, gazing out into the dark yard. He watched her as if the ordinary act was miraculous. It was miraculous. It slaked his thirst.”

The experience of The Great World is the discovery of such auguries of innocence and that poetry is essential to survival, without it your wits are gone. “Memory was a gift, when they really set themselves to it. Lists. You started one and it could be extended forever, back and back, and gone over endlessly, and what you called up became a magic formula for keeping yourself in the world or for wiping yourself, temporarily, out of it. For some it was the numbers game. What they went back to was the number plates of various cars they had owned or had driven at times for the firms they worked for. These numbers were it. Got into the right order, like the combination of a safe they were a key that would unlock the universe. For others it was railway stations. The stations for instance out from Redfern on the Western Line. They went through them slowly, in morning heat sometimes but at others in the chill of smoky winter, on their way to work.”

“He was so unremarkable, Digger, looked so like thee rest of them, barefoot, filthy, in a lap-lap, all bones, that no one could have guessed what he carried along with the pick over his shoulder or the basket with its weight of rubble and stones.

“Once committed to memory these names would be there forever. the whole unit could be called up and paraded in his head, the dead right there with the living, al clean and in good shape again, whether they had drawn a short straw or a long and wherever they were.

Digger remembered them and their names and numbers. And they, each one, remembered whatever they needed to keep them in the world or halfway out of it: number-plate numbers, girls, songs, stations,all the flavours of milkshakes and malteds they served at the Mermaid Cafe, all the shops up and down Elizabeth or Queen or George or Swanston Street, both sides, the names of horses or dairy herds. Put it all together and something, secretly, was being kept alive. What an army marches on when it is no longer marching.”

David Malouf has steered beyond sentiment, bombast and the hundred other traps for players and produced an original novel on an all too familiar subject. The Great World is a fine work , written with a poet’s clarity and restraint and fearless in its reach. It is a book to remember.

“A Voyage Around our Fathers” The Adelaide Review, No.73, Festival edition, 1990, p.29.