Poetic Australian Tales Chart Journeys Into Interior Worlds

David Malouf is one of Australia’s most esteemed writers, equally at home in the realms of poetry and fiction. He is also the author of two opera librettos, a play and an unconventional autobiography, “12 Edmondstone Street.” Most of his novels, like “Harland’s Half Acre” (1984), “The Great World” (1990), “Remembering Babylon” (1993) and “The Conversations at Curlow Creek” (1997), take place in Queensland, where Malouf was born in 1934. But, although Malouf often works on a broad canvas, portraying places, people and events in the panoramic context of history, he is even more interested in evoking the elusive interior worlds of his characters’ perceptions. It is this abiding interest in subtle nuances of consciousness which stamps his novels as the products of a poetic mind.

“I had such a feeling of lightness and happiness it was as if my bones had been changed into clouds,” says the 9-year-old narrator of “Closer,” one of nine short stories in Malouf’s new collection. “I knew it was a dream,” the lad continues. “But dreams can be messages. The feeling that comes with them is real, and if you hold on to it you can make the rest real.” Brought up on a farm in a strict Pentecostal household, the boy is steeped in his family’s faith yet saddened because they have declared his favorite uncle a sodomite, unfit to associate with. In the child’s dream, the daunting distance between the saved and the outcast is simply yet miraculously traversed by love.

Dreams of joy and wish fulfillment are not the only kind of reveries and apparitions that figure in “Dream Stuff,” Malouf’s second collection. In the title piece, a writer revisits the city where he was born. His memories of his 6-year-old self commingle with later memories, and these, in turn, with a present-day experience so violent and bizarre that it seems like a bad dream.

Several stories deal with states of mind connected with war and military service. To a young man joining up in 1951, war seems “a natural thing” that “clarified meanings” and “held you in the line of history.” But the “Night Training” he undergoes provides him with a less glamorous perspective. In “Sally’s Story,” a woman who services the sexual needs of GIs on leave from the Vietnam War finds herself becoming more emotionally involved than she’d expected. And in the story that opens the collection, a boy whose father is missing in action comes to realize he will not be coming back.

For Malouf, landscape bears an intimate relationship to states of mind, whether as a shaping influence or as a metaphor. Sometimes he can be a little heavy-handed in making this point, as in “Jacko’s Reach,” which is not so much a story as a set piece paying tribute to 4 1/2 acres of scrub finally being paved under for a shopping center. This tiny patch of wilderness, predictably, was the scene of much adolescent “wildness” and other hanky-panky. More interestingly, Malouf sees the wilderness both as bedrock reality and as dream stuff: an elemental world more real (and often more frightening) than civilization and a fecund, organic world that frees and feeds the imagination. In “Lone Pine,” the darkest story in the collection, a middle-aged couple hoping to get away from it all on a trip into the wilds meet with danger in a form they had not expected. In “Blacksoil Country,” the 12-year-old narrator understands the land so intimately that he can view his own eventual absorption into it with a kind of equanimity.

“Great Day,” the concluding story, is the longest, almost a novella. Dipping among the viewpoints of various members of a clan gathering to celebrate their patriarch’s 72nd birthday, the story develops gradually, like an old-fashioned darkroom photograph.

It also, alas, has a rather static, posed quality, as if the author were trying too assiduously to make a point about the complexities and contrarieties of the Australian national character. But, like all the stories in this collection, it is a carefully crafted piece of work that repays the patience it demands of the reader.