Dreamers
Francis King
Harland's Half Acre David Malouf (Chatto & Windus £8.95) Recently the following item apPeared,kil), the Times Diary: 'I hear that Australian Broadcasting Corporation an,' the Australian Book Review are to comPte a list of the 10 greatest Australian %WI': since the war. Nominations on a post: stamp please.' As an English judgment 0" any literature other than our own, nothl could be more typically provincial an t patronising. Graham Greene apart, wila, male postwar English novelist has h- stature of Patrick White? Ivy ConaPct°„11; Burnett apart, what female postwar LA:°0. lish novelist has the stature of Christ°, Stead? How many postwar English 10:: ists are the equals of Thomas Kenen Randolph Stow, David Ireland and Davi Malouf? vid How exceptional a novelist Malouf is, will be at once apparent fr°"' the first pages of his Harland's Half MLI‘' in which, like an opal mined from the tir:te of the outback and polished with infinh a care, the life of a poor family °11.0d small-holding in Queensland M the Pell], between the wars is evoked in mysterioilsZ, glimmering, evanescent half-tones. frisk; origin, the father, whose antecedents °d tered away their heritage in ill-jung is speculation, gambling and extravagance,.ft the sort of impractical dreamer, with a,b;1,,a of the gab, who tends to be more atlraemoo to women than to men. By one wife,',5,f to to die, he has two sons; by another v./I" ce die almost as prematurely, he has thrup more. Of these five sons, growing together in an all-male household, 0.;st Frank, is remarkable from his eathair years. Of i0evfescwaonrtldeticdaetifoanm, eheasisaenvartien,,tlisfet.olt Not since Joyce Cary's very ci,itterent The Horse's Mouth, with its very dine so hero Gully Jimpson, has a novelist beett,,,fi successful in communicating the voeanl'e of a man who is both possessed WI visible world and, through the self-denYu;ov efforts of his genius, himself coMes,so possess it. For Frank this possession a repossession; his ancestors frittered awl js't their inheritance of land and now lle,.°101 reclaim it, not merely in pencil, was!,06. pigment, but literally, by secretly OP' ing his earnings on buying back acre after acre. Considered by most people for most ot his life to be no more than an eccentric ,s,waggie', Frank pursues his lonely, ex- 'e(' Vocation in silence, cunning and exile from his home. Eventually, though by now f.antous, he retires to a patch of scrub on an island, where he meets with a death as solitary and mysterious as his life.
Mr Malouf contrasts Frank's deprived childhood with the full one of Phil Vernon, Whose family is as rich and cultivated as Frank's is poor and ignorant. This contrast recalls, in its piquancy and poignancy, that between the two main characters, Dante (a aickname) and Johnno, in his remarkable first novel Johnno. In that book, too, the setting of the childhood and adolescent cnapters is an area south of Brisbane; and too, someone well-to-do and articu- late, Dante, fails to reach the inner core of someone, Johnno, who is neither. After the miraculously limpid evocations o,f, Frank's and Phil's early years, Harland's lialf Acre, though it remains a fascinating novel, declines a little. Phil grows up; and, as the world widens both for him and for tile reader, so characters and incidents proliferate. That intensity of vision, akin to Frank's own as he obsessively observes the World around him and then, with un- wearYing diligence, gets it down on to ,13,413er or canvas, slowly relaxes into some- "nog less unusual and disturbing. This is not to say that there are not still :°nderful things in the second half of this l:vel. There is an extraordinarily moving :.13c-cotint of the way in which Frank's fatherless nephew, torn between Frank, "110 has taken him over, and an over- indulgent mother, kills himself in a mo- illent of despair at his inadequacy. No less memorable is an incident, derived from eseal life, in which the Sydney police discov- e" in the heart of the city, a secret Lip ion camp of vagrants, rounded ,and kept as slaves, many of them in te,alrls, to work for their implacablei. • mas- en released, many of these dere- ors wish to return to their bondage rather vv'Tn face the terrors of freedom. This pnunie eerie episode is handled with so ,Tiudch skill that one regrets that Mr Malouf
„.,!tot save it up for a novel on its own.
theme at the heart of this novel is a "man isolation. Clearly Mr Malouf would fWith Rilke in his remark, in his Letter t„,n a r cuing Poet, 'Love consists in this, that e;etiso°litudes touch and protect and greet nle tiler.' But however intense that love, pr t so I it des can never merge; touching, the ecting and greeting are the most that r_ Y can achieve. For all their liking, acnscppct and admiration for each other, Phil the, rank, like Dante and Johnno before e' remain each on his separate island. etovocalfse it concludes in such an over- helter-skelter manner, this is not peqerfeet novel; but it contains so many the t,,,er things, especially in its accounts of be "ea contrasting childhoods, that it can most warmly
recommended.
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