| | This is the 3rd of 12 for the Book Awards Reading Challenge. In 1991, The Great World (David Malouf) won the Miles Franklin Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Prix Fémina Etranger.
Two Australian boys are raised in dysfunctional families, one of which is extremely unhappy because of the dad’s alcoholism and the other more typically messed up due to different ideals of the way to live held by the mom ("settled") and dad ("free"). In both uprbringing and temperament, the two boys are different. Vic is bent on worldly success to avoid anything like his father’s drunken life, while Digger is more wary of the great world’s expectations and conventions.
Robbed of their chance to contribute in the major event of their generation, they are taken prisoner by the Japanese in Malaya. The POW experience is the center of the novel. One theme is the brutal reality of working as slave laborers on the Burma Siam railway, but another is the meaning that a POW extracts from the experience.
Malouf brings the brutalized characters back to Australia, back to ordinary life, in order to see what two different men make of their lives. Near the end, Digger, more a part of our vibrant universe than most, thinks, "Every moment was dense with causes, possibilities, consequences; too many, even in the simplest case, to grasp. Every moment was dense too with lives, all crossing and interconnecting or exerting pressure on one another . . . ." Any reader into the effect of war on the individual will find particular interest in this novel.
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| | Posted 3/6/2009 5:47 AM - 131 Views - 0 eProps - 1 Comment
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