Allington December 07

An agreeable planet

Patrick Allington

David Malouf
The Complete Stories
Knopf, $45 hb, 508 pp, 9781741666113

David Malouf's The Complete Stories brings together the three and a bit books, spanning twenty-five years, that constitute his forays into shorter fiction: Antipodes (1985), Dream Stuff (2000) and Every Move You Make (2006), along with two stories that accompanied his novella Child’s Play (1982). Given that this is a collection rather than a selection – no stories are cut from the earlier books – the quality ebbs and flows, both from story to story and from book to book. Despite its slight imperfections, The Complete Stories confirms that Malouf is, at his best, a masterful exponent of short fiction. The book is a monument, a sort of literary Big Pineapple, to Malouf’s virtuosity and to his Queensland origins (though the hefty and handsome hardback is let down by its flimsy boards, which rub and bump almost to the touch). Malouf incorporates the lives and foibles of his characters – more often, and more satisfyingly, men – into his bigger vision of the world. He contrasts individuals’ inner worlds with their public façades, then connects them, with thin but unbreakable threads, to their local communities, to magnificently reconstructed landscapes, and ultimately to major historical events and global trends.

Although The Complete Stories is a compilation of previous work, Malouf offers no introduction or retrospective clues. On one level this is a plus; the stories stand on their own. Nevertheless, some exegetical context – a discussion of the evolution of Malouf’s short fiction, and a reflection as to how these books fit within his oeuvre – might have helped alleviate the considerable top-heavy tilt that The Complete Stories possesses. Organised in reverse chronological order, The Complete Stories opens with Every Move You Make. That such a recent book is so prominently reissued seems odd, but the bigger issue is that Every Move You Make is so exceptional that it threatens to eclipse the rest of The Complete Stories.

‘The Valley of Lagoons’, which opens both collections, is a marvel of a story. Ostensibly a coming-of-age tale in which the narrator, Angus, joins his friends and several older men on a hunting trip, it bursts with lyricism, unhurried tautness, Malouf’s remarkable ability to evoke place and his capacity to merge nostalgia with a forensic cultural examination entirely free of didacticism. These qualities combine to make ‘The Valley of Lagoons’ a sad and luminous meditation on mateship, and on the weird, wonderful and often destructive ways that men find to display and avoid intimacy.

Several other stories – ‘Every Move You Make’, ‘War Baby’ and ‘The Domestic Cantata’ – are equally sublime, and explore familiar Malouf themes, including masculinity, intimacy, Australia and faraway wars, memory and family dynamics. The only real dud is ‘Mrs. Porter and the Rock’, in which a grumpy old woman is dragged to Uluru by her son; here, the prose is overburdened by wild hallucinations and by the allusive force of the Rock.

Every Move You Make stands alongside The Great World (1990) as a high point of Malouf’s prose. It is true that none of the short stories, even a near-novella such as ‘The Valley of Lagoons’, can match The Great World’s capacity to range across generations, to track the twists and turns of characters’ lives in the context of a rapidly changing post-World War II Australia, or to unfurl with precision the ways that individual Australians are inexorably bound to world events. But the short stories are elevated by their very concision, the distillation of themes and insights and images, and by the beautifully layered and paced storytelling that Malouf achieves. In his novels, Malouf occasionally seems too intent on coaching readers in his alternative vision of Australian culture and values; and somewhat too methodical in his effort to make contemporary political points, particularly relating to our selective nationalised history and our myth-making. This tendency is barely evident, but present, in The Great World and more overt in Malouf’s colonial-era novels, Remembering Babylon (1993) and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996). In contrast, the stories in Every Move You Make are more relaxed, but they still raise profound and original questions about both human nature and what it means (and meant) to be Australian.

Dream Stuff (2000) sits in the wake of Every Move You Make, and its distinctive qualities take some time to assert themselves. Despite this, and despite a slightly forced umbrella theme encompassing various states of dreaming, it is a diverse and sparkling book. Malouf’s exploration of the rippling effects of foreign wars on Australians at home is particularly sharp-edged. ‘At Schindler’s’ is a poignant account of a twelve-year-old boy, Jack, coming to terms with his father missing in World War II and his mother’s new relationship with Milt, an American serviceman, whom Jack, despite himself, cannot help but like. In ‘Sally’s Story’, a young Sydneysider acts as a temporary ‘wife’ of American servicemen, ‘who, for months amid the welter and din of war, had been hoarding some other dream than the ones that were generally on offer at the Cross: an illusion of domestic felicity in the form of a soft-mouthed girl and the sort of walk-up city-style living that is represented by an intercom and a prohibition against the playing of loud music after eleven o’clock’. Sally endures a variety of desires, demands and modes of behaviour: some men want ‘a wife out of the porno magazines’, some want someone to talk to or yell at or hit or watch getting dressed or educate. ‘What many of them wanted was to have reinforced the illusion of mastery.’

In contrast, ‘Jacko’s Reach’ is only a partial success. It reflects on a town that is about to lose its last patch of scrub, a mythical place of eternal shenanigans, to a shopping mall, a skateboard ramp, tennis courts and a Heritage Walk. While witty and playful, with a tense undertone, it has a mild dose of that most common short story affliction: it is a fine idea that drifts and loses it precision, as if abandoned before completion. ‘Lone Pine’ and ‘Blacksoil Country’, likewise, are modest achievements. In each story the narrative revolves somewhat laboriously around a violent act, and an uncharacteristic listlessness results.

In Dream Stuff, the best comes last. ‘Great Day’ is a long, rich and ambitious family saga set in a rambling property perched on a seaside cliff outside of town. Malouf constructs an intricately layered and uncompromising portrait of the Tyler clan, who believe ‘deeply in their rightness and goodwill’. He shifts the story’s perspective seamlessly, incorporating Audley, an eminent former public service head, his wife Madge, a children’s author who ‘had been looked up to by three generations of children as the mother they most wished for, a cross between a mad aunt and a benign but careless witch’, their sons, and a present and ex-daughter-in-law. This intricately layered, uncompromising and at times hilarious family portrait soars to even greater heights when Audley’s birthday party is interrupted by news that the town’s museum, a place in which many of Audley’s family artefacts are housed, is ablaze. It is easy to imagine ‘Great Day’ swelling to become a novel, yet it is a miraculously complete story, filled with characters who seem fully alive almost as soon as Malouf introduces them.

Antipodes, now more than twenty years old, is uneven but contains plenty of splendid writing. While its energy and bravado serve most of the stories well, its qualities shine more brightly when viewed in its own right (think Penguin paperback, with white-wrinkled covers and yellowing pages) rather than within The Complete Stories. The diversity, and the pace of the stories, creates a sizzling energy. ‘Southern Skies’ is a claustrophobic and challenging portrayal of a professor’s sexual interest in a fifteen-year-old boy. In ‘A Traveller’s Tale’, an enthusiastic but battle-weary Arts Council travelling lecturer encounters the unknown daughter, now an old woman, of a famous diva. In the odd but beautiful ‘In Trust’, a Holocaust survivor collapses and dies in front of a museum photograph of his family at Treblinka, and a girl takes pleasure in a gift of X-rays of ‘Aunt Connie’s young man’, who had died decades before on a French battlefield. In ‘Bad Blood’, Brisbane ‘softens and rots’, as does the narrator’s Uncle Jake, his racy reputation fading to leave the shell of a man.

Other stories in Antipodes fall flat. What seems askew at times is a quality integral to short fiction: a balance between what is told and what is untold, between the need for compression and the desire to say something universal. To call Antipodes raw is not to suggest that Malouf was lackadaisical as he wrote these stories. In Antipodes, the exuberance, the intelligence and the originality of the writing win out. But it is categorically less well crafted than Every Move You Make and Dream Stuff.
The two stories from Child’s Play (1982) end The Complete Stories on a high note. ‘Eustace’ is a sinister and disturbing tale of a youth who enters a girls’ boarding house at night and befriends Jane: ‘So it was that he began to talk of a time when they would run away together. He sulked, he cajoled, he was insistent.’ ‘The Prowler’ is a sardonic saga of a man – or several men, or a city full of men – assaulting women. Even as he (or they) instils panic, the prowler captures the imagination of the public and the newspapers: ‘If the prowler ceased to exist we would have to reinvent him … The police, of course, are well aware of the difficulty. They have to catch the prowler but also to put a stop to the assaults. The first is still a possibility, the second is not. “You can arrest a prowler, but how do you arrest an epidemic?”’

Despite the recycling, The Complete Stories is one of the books of the year. At its best, David Malouf’s short fiction is brilliant, intuitive and visionary. At other times it is ‘merely’ excellent, apart from a few stories which either misfire, drift or solidify. It is more than a decade since Malouf’s last novel, but Every Move You Make and Dream Stuff are not second-best offerings. On the contrary, Malouf continues to challenge himself as a writer and a thinker, and to take chances, while also maintaining and further developing his exploration of familiar themes. The Complete Stories suggests that in Malouf’s world the glass is always half-empty … and always half-full. As Chipper, a character from ‘Towards Midnight’ (Dream Stuff), says just before he dies, ‘I’m not sorry … to have wasted my time on such an agreeable planet.’

Patrick Allington is an Adelaide-based writer, and fiction editor of Etchings.