Fly Away Peter

This is an exquisite little novella that begins in beauty on the coast of Queensland and ends (almost) in the mud of Flanders on the other side of the world. Birds, of course, make similar migrations; this is one of the things that fascinates 20-year-old Jim Saddler as he studies birds with borrowed binoculars, noting their species, their habits, their comings and goings. He strikes up a friendship with Ashley Crowther, the young owner of this stretch of Australian farmland, and also with Imogen Harcourt, a middle-aged photographer with a similar passion. But then the 1914 War breaks out, and Jim and Ashley sign up, in different regiments and at different ranks. There are many books about the Western Front. The ingredients are all much the same: boredom, companionship, carnage. What makes one stand out from another is the quality of the writing, the particular point of view, and whatever aspects of normal life the author chooses to set against the obscenity of war. The last book I read about the trenches, for example, Sebastian Barry's A LONG LONG WAY, was written with a rich Irish poetry, kept its point of view very much at ground level, and set the War against the very different Irish fight for independence back home. Malouf's writing is also poetic, but simpler, and he excels particularly at describing the air above and the land behind the war, as in the following: "Often, as Jim later discovered, you entered the war through an ordinary looking gap in a hedge. One minute you were in a ploughed field, with snowy troughs between ridges that marked old furrows and peasants off at the edge of it digging turnips or winter greens, and the next you were through the hedge and on duckboards, and although you could look back and still see the farmers at work, or sullenly watching as the soldiers passed over their land and went slowly below ground, there was all the difference in the world between your state and theirs. They were in a field and very nearly at home. You were in the trench system that led to the war." But it is Malouf's juxtaposition of the battlefield to the Australian nature reserve that is so daring. For there is no possibility of a literal resolution that connects them. Indeed, Malouf seems to avoid following narrative links; Ashley and Jim barely meet again, and the biplane so prominently featured on the cover ultimately serves only to offer Jim a metaphor for his own bird's eye view on life. Yet it is an important metaphor. The two halves of the book portray beauty and destruction with memorable power. But the coherence of the novel as a whole depends upon the final chapter, which returns to Imogen Harcourt watching the birds among the sand dunes. I had to sleep on this and re-read it for it to fully work, but now I see the beauty in her simple understanding of the life that connects both birds and man.

Malouf deals with big themes here: the continuities of nature; the horror of human conflict; our desire to hold onto the past, and the necessity of relinquishing it. But he handles them in such a personal, beautiful and profoundly moving way that he manages to say it all in under 150 pages. Some readers might prefer more languorous pacing, but Malouf has no reason to stall. Unlike many writers, he knows precisely what he's doing. His precision is utterly astounding. He can say more, move you more, in a dozen pages than lesser writers seem to manage in whole careers. Chapter 14, scarcely more than 2000 words, is the most powerful account of the Great War - what it meant, what it can be made to mean - that I have ever read.

..Malouf's writing shines with nothing but a beautiful magic in his telling of human existence. Personally I prefered the first half of the book, with his slow but thoroughly engaging depictions of 3 people's shared happy laziness in the corner of an Australian lake. The war was also wonderfully drawn, but it carries all of its power in the contrast, and its emotional affect on the otherwise unaffected 'other side of the world'. No question it's Malouf's best.

Having studied this text for my year 12 studies, I thought that no novel could ever be better than this one. Having the advantage of being able to relate to the novel from past experience, it was like reliving those days with Jim and Ashley. An obsolutely outsanding book and it deserved every right to hold the title of the book of the year. Congratulations once again on a successful book. It'll be a long time till another book will come close to topping this one. David will always be a legend.

I highly recommend "Fly Away Peter" to anyone who either enjoys reading David Malouf's work or to anyone who may be discovering him for the first time. In this book, Malouf's images of the absolute horrors of war are nothing short of amazing. I could almost smell the stench of dead and dying bodies while I read. Battle after battle you find yourself praying for our hero to make it through once more. I have read several of Malouf's works and found this one to be particularly haunting. The characters of Jim Saddler and Ashley Crowther became so well know to me, that in the final pages of the book I found myself in tears. It was so moving I couldn't help myself. Read "Fly Away Peter" and I guarantee you too will be hooked on Malouf. He is not only one of the finest writers in Australia but without a doubt one of the finest writers of our time.