Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia, 1983 (first published 1982) ISBN 014007015X
As my wife said to me this morning, David Malouf seems to fly under the radar in the world of Australian Letters. Now at the end of his life, he is in my opinion the finest living Australian novelist, and I don't like admitting that I haven't read enough of his work - you can see my reviews of Ransom and Dream Stuff here.
The secret to Malouf's success as a novelist is that he is actually a poet: his poetic instincts allow him to evoke a scene or a character in a minimum of words, and to almost unfailingly produce the right word at the right time. Fly away Peter is a little gem of a novel: a story of nature, life and death compressed into 130 pages of shimmering prose.
The story is a deceptively simple one - Jim Saddler is a bird-watcher, who is employed by Ashley Crowther - the owner of a large farm in Queensland - to create a bird sanctuary on his land. Jim meets and befriends Imogen Harcourt, who is a wildlife photographer. When World War I breaks out, both Jim and Ashley initially resist joining up, but eventually end up in France, where Jim loses his best friend to an artillery shell, and another to gas, before he himself dies. Ashley is wounded in the same action, while Imogen is left in Australia to mourn Jim's loss.
It is not the narrative thread that is most important in this novel - it is the evocation of worlds, and of life. The early chapters shine with Malouf's description of bird life, and the wonder Jim has that such seemingly fragile creatures can traverse the world. This is a migration that Jim makes himself, as he arrives in France to see some of his birds again in their other home, before being exposed to the horrors of war.
The meditations on life don't end there; Malouf weaves them through the book. How the big decisions - such as going to war - we sometimes don't think much about at all, while we sweat over smaller ones. How fragile life itself is and how quickly it can be lost, and how painful it is to lose each life. As it dawned on me that Jim has died I found myself pleading with the gods to not let it be so. Such is the power of Malouf's writing.
Fly away Peter is the novel distilled: so much is said with so few words, and the words cut deeply into the reader. I'll leave this review with a quote from the book which in my opinion gets to the heart of what Malouf is saying - "That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature. To set anything above it, birth, position, talent even, was to deny to all but a few among the infinite millions what was common and real, and what was also, in the end, most moving. A life wasn't for anything. It simply was."
And this simply is a wonderful piece of writing. Highly recommended.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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