<Bt-5z25>Malouf shows his strong characterisation of
AUSTRALIA is often a backpacker’s destination of choice when otherwise lost. Its Ayers Rock and glittering Sydney are so far away and seasonally upside down that it must be the place to find a sense of purpose in the unsure time between adolescence and age.The Australians peopling David Malouf’s short stories feel the same pull. Bookish and wayward children, a celebrated politician, bored parents, a draftee waiting to ship off, a woman howling in the streets in grief — all restlessly seek some kind of validation from their own landscape.
“I thought that everything I found unsatisfactory in myself, in my life but also in my nature, would come right out here, because that is what I had seen, or thought I had, in others. Kids who had been out here, and whom I had thought of till then as wild and scattered, had come back settled in their own aggregation of muscle, bone, and flesh, in some new accommodation with the world,” muses a teen finally allowed on an annual hunting trip in The Valley of Lagoons.
The story is part of a new collection that os The Complete Stories<$>, which then works backward through Malouf’s previous three collections of short fiction. All the stories showcase Malouf’s strong characterisation of Australians sometimes feeling like strangers in their own country, and vivid descriptions of half-finished beach houses in Sydney, small towns where concrete is replacing timber “soft to the thumb”, and the empty black soil country in between.
The Ayers Rock monolith that elderly Mrs. Porter refuses to acknowledge in the new story Mrs. Porter and the Rock glows red-ly through a window.
But the hotel lobby shines, too. Malouf writes: “Dim lighting, the lampshades glowing gold. Outside the beginnings of night, blue-luminous.
The long room suspended out there in reflection so that the lounge chairs and gold-legged glass-topped tables floated above a carpet of lawn, among shrubs that might simply have sprouted through the floorboards, and they too, she and Donald and some people who were standing in a group behind them, also floating and transparent, in double exposure like ghosts.”
Malouf’s early themes exploring the awkwardness of waiting for life to begin and the darker secrets of childhood come closer to resolution in the newest collecn, Every Move You Make. Grown-up children who left home realise they failed to really do so, as Australia rises every night in their dreams.
It’s a caution to backpackers: You can end up no less confused and no more settled than when you began the journey.
