Points of departure

An angel of death hovers over David Malouf's new collection of short stories, Every Move You Make. Perhaps it is inevitable: Malouf has just turned 73, and the horizon where the known world joins the unknown is getting closer. "Death is the big event," he said in a recent interview. "You'd be pretty foolish to ignore it." In these beautiful stories, death sometimes arrives abruptly in suburban lives and draws the living towards it. But sometimes it seems not so much an end, or even a translation, as an encounter with the magical, bright mystery that complements and makes sense of life.

In "Mrs Porter and the Rock," Dulcie Porter is fragmenting; dementia is breaking up her mind. Death, which she has managed to forget since her childhood, is filling up the spaces, leaving her son baffled and furious. Yet Mrs Porter takes her transformation lightly, chuckling as she goes. The unnamed woman in "Towards Midnight," the best of the stories in this book, welcomes the angelic swimmer in the pool of her Tuscan villa, too. She feels his arrival in the silvery midnight as a vibration of wings, and sees "streamers of light at his shoulders" as he beats up and down. Although he is probably a migrant worker who has found his way in, she knows he is a herald of her own departure, the moment when she will, with relief, "pass the weight of her body… to some other agency."

Death has been much on Malouf's mind, he says, since 11th September 2001. But actually death has been his subject since his first novels were published in the 1970s—or, rather, it has always been a part of his great subject, the dissolution of the self, its destruction and remaking. Transformations, miracles, slippages into other times and states are always possible, a heartbeat away. Some of Malouf's characters allow them in, others resist them forcibly: the choice fills his fictions.

The stories in Every Move you Make are set in different times and spaces: 1950s or 1960s small-town Queensland; modern Sydney; Ayers Rock. But despite Malouf's success at evoking these places, his fiction is determinedly interior, and the outer world always seems to resonate with the inner. Though he lovingly renders the day-to-day relationships of his characters—in this collection he is particularly good on the irritations and fondnesses of domestic life—they are usually in the process of finding out something about themselves. So Charlie Dowd in "War Baby" hangs around in his small town before he is drafted and hangs around when he gets back, waiting for something to shift and change inside himself "and open the way to the future." When rain turns the town playground into a lake and hundreds of seagulls flock in, they bring with them not just diversion and joy for the local children, but a kind of grace for Charlie. "The dry little park had transformed itself into a new shore, but the force he felt in touch with was in himself."

This is Malouf's typical writerly curve: a precise description of the quotidian world that leads on to a revelation inside. He says that he is not so much interested in particular events as in "how it is that people in their own inner world deal with things," how they make what he names an "inner history."

Beyond his fiction, Malouf has what he calls "a separate writing life," lecturing, writing about Australian history and literature, and campaigning for Aboriginal rights. But in his fiction he prefers, as novelists do, to treat historical and contemporary issues through character. Thus Remembering Babylon (1993), his best-known novel, is not only an evocation of the rough lives of 19th-century settlers, but also a description of the eradications and forgetfulness upon which modern Australia has built its identity, a lament for the lost riches of Aboriginal civilisation and, perhaps, a plea for their recovery. It contrasts, too, what Malouf sees as an essentially European way of being in nature—that it is a garden for man to cultivate—with the Aboriginal conception of a land that is untameable and alive, which man may conserve but can never dominate. Of course, there is no more contemporary issue than this, but Malouf does not need to labour that point.

Malouf was born in 1934 in Brisbane on the tropical eastern edge of Australia. His father was a Lebanese Christian, his mother a Sephardic Jew whose family had reached Australia by way of Spain and London. Nourished as a child on his mother's stories of her London home, life must have seemed a matter of migrations, of pushing outwards to new worlds, only to find that others had gone before. The new world was never empty but, on the contrary, replete not only with the voices of the dead but also with the mysteries of another, living culture. Edmondstone Street in Brisbane, where Malouf grew up, skirted Musgrave park, "a dark, uneven place," once an Aboriginal burial ground, "but later redeemed." Underneath the house, though, Malouf as a child could go back to that world, into the "forest" of piles that anchor the house into the earth, "that stretches for miles" from his father's tool shed to the front veranda.

It is from this forest, and from the world of childhood, that Malouf's strangers often emerge, bringing fear and transformation. Remembering Babylon begins with three settler children playing at being hunters in a forest. They are interrupted by the appearance of something "flapping towards them out of a world over there, beyond the no man's land of the swamp, that was the abode of everything savage and fearsome." It is Gemmy, a white man who has lived for years with Aborigines. He crashes over the boundary fence into the settlers' world, the embodiment of their fears of beyond—the lost, Aboriginal and original part of Australia and themselves.

Malouf's writing is never grandiose or precious, because he insists that the magical is mundane, and vice versa. He may be part of a tradition in gay writing that suggests, with Forster, that the world is full of undisclosed connections and mysteries; and with James that we can be changed in moments of epiphany. Nevertheless, his characters are shopkeepers or miners, soldiers, runaways and builders. His settings for epiphany are similarly modest: a Queensland settler village in Remembering Babylon, a dusty river crossing in the scrub beyond Sydney in The Great World (1990), a remote hut in New South Wales in Conversations at Curlew Creek (1996). Within and beyond these ordinary places, and sometimes in the most ordinary things, lie missing pieces of Malouf's protagonists, and missing pieces of ourselves. One day, something, or someone, will arrive there to disturb, destroy and transform.

Malouf's written style is one of controlled extravagance. The language is simple, with occasional borrowing from Italian, and his prose a constant surprise and delight. It is designed to deliver its sense rhythmically, and is often punctuated for movement as much as for grammar. But what streams off it most is light. "Sky-lit," "silvery," "running fire," "glitter," "shimmer," "flame," "blaze": open any Malouf novel and the brightness pours out. Light—the element of Australia, of its limitless horizons and the heat of its deserts—dissolves, deceives and absorbs its opposite. Malouf's characters move within it, sometimes warily, sometimes disappearing.

In my favourite Malouf story, "Closer"—from the collection Dream Stuff (2000)—the being from beyond is not a child or an Aborigine but the narrator's uncle, with blond highlights in his hair, driving a silver BMW—number plate GAY 437. Banished from the family, he visits his niece in a dream, glowing and "smooth all over, like an angel." This poignant and wonderful story, only eight pages long, concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes. It should not be unpackaged; it needs to be read.