Sideways details

David Malouf
EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE
256pp. Chatto and Windus. £14.99.
0 7011 8048 X

 
“Nothing had happened”, reflects literal-minded Mrs Porter, in one of David Malouf’s stories, following an uneventful trip with her son Donald to Ayers Rock, or Uluru. Lack of drama has not stopped Donald from writing half a dozen ironical, recondite, sparkling letters to his friends about it. “She wondered sometimes what on earth he found to say.” The Mrs Porters reading this had better stop now. Malouf’s new collection is a powerful, often disturbing, demonstration of Virginia Woolf’s dictum that in real literature, as in real life, nothing much happens. In his stories, to paraphrase Woolf, there is no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catas-trophe in the conventional sense. Ensconced in the semi-transparent envelope of consciousness, his characters face the incremental, insidious demands of the day-to-day with varying degrees of awareness. In Every Move You Make nothing happens, not twice, but seven times. “Mrs Porter and the Rock” contains all the elements characteristic of the paradigm: the ordinarily obtuse protagonist, caught in a quiet crisis that generates, not a lightning flash, but only a hazy halo of illumination; the public moment that doesn’t lead to any new or profound insight, the private moment that almost does. After a weekend’s sterile sightseeing Mrs Porter’s near-epiphany arrives, not as a result of her contemplation of Ayers Rock, but triggered by the memory of a large beached dorado or “fish dolphin” which, as a child, she had once watched painfully die: “The pulsing under the gills fluttered, then ceased, and the flesh . . . grew silvery-grey, then leaden . . . . This was a moment, she knew, that she would never forget. Never. As long as she lived. She also knew, with certainty, that she would live for ever”. The recollection is unspectacular and its conclusion neatly and ironically placed: in that moment, Mrs Porter dies.

The stories are full of such quiet ironies, not all fatal. In “The Valley of Lagoons”, the focus appears to be the childhood friendship of the narrator, Angus, with Braden McGowan, and the distance that develops between them as they begin to grow up. Angus is the awkward, bookish only son of a liberal small-town Queensland solicitor, Braden one of three “rough kids”, all boys, living on a nearby farm. Malouf is good at evoking such fine calibrations in gentility. Unlike the McGowans, Angus and his sisters wear shoes to school (this “was regarded as unnecessary and even, perhaps, damaging in a boy”). Angus and his father also do not participate in the annual August pig hunt in the Valley of Lagoons, a male rite of passage “that was sacred in its way” – “fellows who went out there were changed”. The pig hunt represents belonging, the most unabashedly obvious symbol in the story of a masculine world of “settled life and neighbourliness”. Angus longs to participate, but running counter to this desire is an opposing sense of his own difference, which finds an echo in Braden: “the revelation . . . of bright, conjectural futures we would have admitted to no one else”.

It is Braden, surprisingly, who turns out to be the acknowledged outsider, developing an interest in cybernetics, and a sense of intellectual purpose, that separate him finally from his family and friends. But this is only the back story. Malouf’s true concern is with the wider themes of identity and displacement, and how these can be bound up with a particular physical setting. Angus is desperate to go on that pig hunt, and when he is sixteen he gets his chance. His former friendship with Braden has by now been completely supplanted by an uneasy alliance with Braden’s thuggish older brother Stuart.

Inarticulate, bullying and rankly male, Stuart is besotted with Angus’s remorselessly independent sister, Katie. The two are locked in an erotic stand-off that generates much of the narrative tension of the story and creates the context for some finely observed turkeycocking (“What Stuart needed me for”, decides Angus, “was to be a witness to his sorrows”). The pig hunt, when it comes, serves as a nexus for the story’s energies: restless masculinity, adolescent disaffection, and Angus’s abiding but unspecified self-doubts. Malouf has sometimes been accused of not grounding his prose in a sufficiently specific or modern physical milieu, but here the “grey-green nondescript wilderness” of the Queensland setting aptly gestures towards a wider sense of timelessness, as Angus at last comes to accept that the narrow world he has been born into cannot provide the template he needs for adulthood (Malouf, who is gay, has said that the story is based on a pig shoot he himself went on as a young man). Angus’s epiphany is couched entirely in negative terms – “I was no more settled, no less confused. I would bring nothing back that would be visible to others – to my father, for instance. I had lost something; that was more like it”. What has he lost? The image of himself as a future small-town Queensland patriarch, perhaps. At the very moment of divestment, Angus hears a shot: as extravagant proof of the sincerity of his sexual suffering, Stuart has wounded himself in the thigh. The gesture is both an aggressive assertion of his virility (“all it demanded of him was that he should grit his teeth and bear a little pain, physical pain, be a man”) and at the same time utterly emasculating (“it was too excessive, too wide of what was accessible to the code we lived by. An hysterical girl might do such a thing but not a man”). In one stroke Malouf has turned his hoary symbol inside out: instead of being the expected bonding session for these ol’ buddies, the pig hunt has thrown into question just what, exactly, masculinity is.

“The Valley of Lagoons” is, in fact, uncharacteristically frank about the underlying ruthlessness of sex, and its connection in the psyche with death. Elsewhere in these stories, Malouf evinces a more characteristic pudeur. Charlie Dowd, the boyish Vietnam conscript in “War Baby”, is eager to take up a friend’s offer to fix him up with a girl “before you go and get your collateral blown off”, but misses the appointment and instead spends his last night at home drinking and reminiscing with an old friend from primary school. When he returns from Vietnam three years later, his newly acquired experience of both sex and death is a given. Charlie, it should be noted, is a willing conscript. Malouf hints at “the unnatural excitements and dreams he had been dragged through, the brutal descents into degradation”, but shadowy references to “the random brute agents of destruction” and the “combustive actualities” of war are as much as we get. “War Baby” is not a war story at all, and the Vietnam experience itself is a giant red herring.

Malouf’s real interest is in “how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel, the fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures that might be the motor of change”. As Charlie himself realizes, he is both changed and fundamentally unchanged by whatever monstrosities have happened to him, because his appetite for experience meant that he was never really guiltless to start with: “It wasn’t a question of innocence, or the loss of innocence . . . how could you lose what you’d never had? He had never claimed to be innocent. Only alive”. Here too, the public event has provided a narrative distraction, a smokescreen for a private and unshowy – and quietly ironic – moment of insight.

Malouf invokes the paradigm again in “Elsewhere”, a more explicit companion piece. Here the arena of experience is Sydney, to which Andy Mayo has been dispatched to attend the funeral of his wife’s sister, Debbie (his wife, Helen, “couldn’t go. She had the children” – which tells us all we need to know about conjugal life in provincial Lithgow, where Andy, a solid husband and father, works “down the mine”). Exhilarated by the allure of the “faster and more crowded world” of the Big Smoke, Andy sets off for the funeral full of sexual expectation, his vision of his lost youthful “golden and inextinguishable self” and its yearnings suddenly revived. And the funeral does not disappoint. The free-living Debbie, as Andy discovers when leafing through a book of poetry he finds on a shelf at the reception, was muse to a Sydney poet (“Odd words jumped out at him. ‘Witchery’ was one . . . . In another place, ‘cunt’. Right there on the page. So unexpected it made his stomach jump. In a book of poetry!”), and her friends are equally obliging. Soon Andy is pinned against a wall with a woman’s hands down his trousers: “All this now was what he had expected or hoped for, but he was surprised how little of the initiative was his. Somewhere in the back of his head, as the woman urged her tongue into it and her hand went exploring below, he was repeating to himself: ‘I’m Debbie’s brother-in-law. She’s dead, this is her wake’”.

But this is a story by Malouf – nothing happens. The willing woman becomes unwilling and disappears. Andy makes the long drive home to his wife, through one of Malouf’s indeterminate, eerie, cosmic landscapes: “Under banks of smoky cloud a rounded moon bounced along treetops. He put on speed and felt released. Not from his body – he was more aware than ever of that, of its blockiness and persistence – but from the earth’s pull upon it. As if, seated here in this metal capsule, knees flexed, spine propped against tilted leather, it was the far high universe they were sailing through”. In spite of its lyrical gesture at freedom, however, this is not the image that persists once the story is done. Infinitely more resonant and pathetic is Andy’s pre-seduction glimpse of clothes hung out to dry on a washing line at the back of the house in Sydney where the funeral reception takes place:

He thought of Helen. Of the girls. He did not want the feeling of sadness that came to him, which had been there all day, he felt, under the throb of expectation, and which declared itself now in the way these clothes had been hung out, the tea towels all crooked, the shirts pegged awkwardly at the shoulder so that the sleeves hung empty and slack.

This, not the ensuing grope against the wall, is the real epiphany: those clothes speak poignantly of the actual domestic and personal future that awaits Andy back in Lithgow. They are just one instance of the way in which Malouf deftly uses the commonplace, the everyday, as a coalescing point for his characters’ moments of insight. In “The Domestic Cantata” it is much more than a moment: Sam, a composer, husband and father of five, who feels he must constantly negotiate a truce between the demands of his work and the intrusive chaos – discarded boots and unrinsed coffee cups and sopping towels – of his household, has in fact based his entire career on giving successful musical expression to the amplitude represented by his domestic set-up: emotional warmth, dailiness, the accommodation of ordinary human mess.

The title story, too, locates its epiphany squarely in the contemplation of things. Having thrown her energies into a long and frustrating relationship with the elusive Mitch, Jo takes stock, after his sudden death, of the detritus that is left: “So what did she mean to do? Change nothing? Leave everything just as it was? The out-of-date magazines, that dead match beside the leg of the coffee table, the bits of wire, the sock? To gather fluff over the weeks and months, a dusty tribute that she would sit int he midst of for the next twenty years?”. Here, as so often in these deceptively uneventful and quietly troubling stories, it is the sly, sideways detail that provides the moment of real truth.

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Elizabeth Lowry is deputy head of Rye St Antony School, Oxford, and a Research Fellow in English at Greyfriars Hall.