THE GREAT WORLD

by David Malouf ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1991

Not your typical war novel--there are no combat scenes, and the war ends between chapters halfway through--Australian author Malouf's first US publication is a sweepingly ambitious tale of 70 years in the lives of two men knitted roughly together by their POW experiences under the Japanese in Malaya. Malouf begins in the present with Digger Keen, a former flyweight boxer living with his idiot sister Jenny, then goes back to prewar days for the boyhood of aggressive Vic Curran, orphaned by a brawl that claimed his hard-drinking father and adopted by the genteel Warrenders. Digger and Vic strike up a friendship as POWs after the Japanese casually overrun Malaya; but then when Mac, a fellow prisoner, is killed in a fight between Mac and one of his Japanese guards, Vic feels himself slip in another life--a life he never should have lived, marked on his return home by his loss of Lucille Warrender to a Yank and his marriage to her sister Ellie, his futile affairs, his lonely years wheeling and dealing in shaky financial deals as Digger, returned to the same Australian town, begins a 20-year involvement with Mac's sister-in-law Iris (whom he'd first seen in a vision in Malaya) and a profoundly uneasy friendship with Vic. Generations pass, bringing to new prominence figures like Warrender grandsons Greg and Alex (now Vic's business manager) in sharply etched scenes showing Digger's and Vic's lives as mere postludes to their wartime disillusionment. But the real movement here is the passage of years, whose cycles Malouf evokes with a kind of dreary brilliance; it's hard to think of a novel that so briefly and authoritatively captures such a span of time. Though sometimes trapped by its characters' own dullness, this is a warmly perceptive story, full of slanted observations, about the costs of war on that other great world.

Pub Date: March 1, 1991

ISBN: 0679748369

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION