LITERARY prizes, however welcome, do carry many of the hazards associated with a magician's trick bouquet. It is often better for a writer's reputation to be short listed than to win. Winners tend to be judged more harshly than losing contenders. Defeat can be more respectable victory is often suspect, disputed. The prize itself may overshadow the winning book while the writer either disappears amid the celebration or, perhaps, doesn't even surface.
It is almost 20 years since the Australian writer David Malouf wrote his second novel, An Imaginary Life (1978). Its international success not only made him famous, it enabled him to resign from teaching to concentrate on fiction and poetry. He has long been recognised as the literary heir of Australia's pioneering modernist and Nobel laureate, Patrick White (1912-90), and certainly Remembering Babylon carries echoes of such White classics as The Tree of Man (1954) and Voss (1957), while an earlier work, Harland's Half Acre (1984), is a gentler variation on the theme of the making of an artist, as explored in White's vicious The Vivisector (1970). Yet earlier this year, on the eve of Bloomsday, when he was presented with the inaugural IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Remembering Babylon, his eighth novel, it was as if he had just been discovered. More importance was given to the monetary value of the prize than the literary merit of the book.
The timing of the prize was also difficult for Malouf. More than four years had passed since he completed 1993 Booker contender, Remembering Babylon, which was also short listed for that year's Irish Times International Fiction Prize, so his thoughts on the night of the prize giving were understandably more focused on his then forthcoming book, The Conversations at Curlow Creek which has just been published. Courtly and practical, Maloul, at 62 years of age, does not appear overly worried about having been treated as "a new kid on the block" although he did notice albeit with more amusement than irritation. An animated talker, he is also self contained, direct, extremely precise and an opinionated reader. Indeed, he appears to read so widely it is a wonder where he finds the time to write.
War, the themes of exile, alienation and the transposing of cultures continue to dominate his work and feature strongly in The Conversations at Curlow Creek, which goes back further in history than his previous books. Set in 1827, it is the story of Adair, a police officer who finally confronts his own past in the course of a rambling, night long dialogue with Carney, a prisoner awaiting execution.
"I wanted to set up a very simple extreme situation, it is life as stripped down as possible," says Malouf. "You could almost say it is just about two men, sitting in the dark in a hut, talking."
He pauses. "It is a book about mortality. The only thing certain is that Carney is going to die."
Malouf speaks of the deliberate vagueness and darkness of the book. Smaller in scale than either of its immediate predecessors, Remembering Babylon and The Great World (1990), it is an intense study of one man, Michael Adair, and the moral dilemma which has become his life. "He is a divided man there is the public duty and the private self. Roles have taken over. Even when he first appears in the hut, Carney asks him is he a priest. His troopers don't like him. They resent his authority. There are no heroes in this book."
No. Ghosts replace heroes here. In contrast with the harsh physicality of the book Adair smells the unwashed Carney before he actually sees him are the persistent images of his past. Presented as a man of no imagination, the stiff, rigid Adair certainly possesses a memory and suffers the fate of the compulsive observer. Malouf is sympathetic to Adair "He is a man who has spent his life looking in from the outside, asking himself, `why am I here?'"
In the darkness of the hut, itself situated in an unspecified, raw New South Wales landscape, Adair, impressed by Carney's stoicism, finds his thoughts returning to the childhood spent by default in a privilege he was not born into. When Adair's parents die he is raised in chaotic grandeur by a wealthy eccentric in the west of Ireland. An unexpected narrative shift leads Malouf's novel towards an entirely different genre, that of the Big House novel. Remembering Babylon is a parable as well as a straight forward narrative, it tells the story of how Australia came into being. The new book is more concerned with how the settlers treated each other when they got there. It is interesting that in contrast with the vagueness of the Australia he presents in the novel, a sense of 19th century Ireland is strongly evoked.
Conscious that much of the individual histories of characters he has written about take place in other countries, Malouf says. "A lot of places are always reaching back to the places where those histories came from." In The Great World, one of the characters recalls. "She too was eager to get out of her present life and be settled. It was what she had come all these miles for. And something he [her husband] had said, just in passing had caught her ear. The place he came from bore his name. Back home in England that meant something, an ancestral house or manor, or a sizeable farm at least. Family names on a map were solid they rooted you in things that could be measured in so many acres.
The themes of land and settlement have relatively minor roles in The Conversations at Curlow Creek. Stark and bleak, less lyric but beautifully written, is far more concerned with internal life. And somewhat unexpectedly it is more obviously a romance, even an operatic one, than any of his previous books, although Remembering Babylon explores love in a stronger, far more real way. Unrequited love has driven Adair to Australia. As a knight on a romantic quest he must find out what happened to Fergus, the improbable man Virgina, his beloved, loves. She, it is true, is not one of Malouf's more memorable female characters, and as Malouf remarks of her, she's a liar and she wants life to be more interesting.
Adair's is a doomed love, a fact he is well aware of, as Malouf writes in the novel. "She would grow old in the fanaticism of her first love. The languor and excited anguish it caused her would become in time he knew only too well this particular adjustment its own satisfaction, bitter but also reassuring. She would cling to what she had lost for no other reason than to prove that she had once possessed it, turn devotion into a cult."
WRITTEN in six weeks, An Imaginary Life, which he describes as a gift "I still don't know how I came to write it" appears on the surface to be an extraordinarily European novel. It marks a dramatic progression from his debut, Johnno (1975), an atmospheric evocation of a Brisbane boyhood. A haunting dramatic monologue in which the exiled poet Ovid, banished to a wilderness at the remotest point of the Roman Empire, An Imaginary Life tells the story of his encounter with a wild boy raised by wolves. It is in fact a powerful metaphor for Australia, symbolising its place at the edge of the world. "I used the theme of Ovid's exile and the issue of finding yourself set down at the edge of the world. How do you make that edge become a centre?"
After a long apprenticeship when it was viewed as merely an adjunct to the literature of the Mother Country Australian fiction has asserted itself internationally, a process admittedly begun by White. Over the past 20 years we no longer see ourselves in relation to England, we relate to other writers writing in English." An Imaginary Live is a persuasive, post colonial text, it is an account of a cultural quest. Malouf's books have continued to explore the Australian identity within a landscape which sustains its mysteries. "It is not a hostile landscape but it is an ancient one. We are still just trying to explain it and it is not easily explained."
His multi layered narratives about history, landscape, life, the making of a country, are different from each other, yet all co-exist as individual rooms in the same house. The metaphor pleases him.
"I like the fact they're different but belong to the same family," he says. I am writing the history of Australia, of how it came into being, but I'm also writing about individuals, human experience. The general and the specific."
