Matters of life and death in modern Australia

Fiction:Contemporary Australia lives and breathes, shudders, groans and even scratches without a trace of inhibition throughout these seven vivid narratives from one of the finest of contemporary writers.

David Malouf, of Lebanese origin but fully and eloquently Australian, has often written about the past while always keeping an alert ear to the present. Intuitive but never knowing, Malouf knows that atmospheric understatement is often the most articulate approach to the wider story that encases every story. This new collection is very much concerned with the present and the way individual lives get through the days that make up a life.

Much of his fiction to date has been rooted in great themes, for example the story of 19th-century Australia as explored in the inaugural International Impac Dublin Literary Award winner Remembering Babylon (1993) and The Conversations at Curlew Creek (1996), and that of Australia at war, in The Great World (1990) and Fly Away Peter (1982). Malouf is subtle, lyric and insistent. His stories enter the memory and stay there. One of his earliest works, An Imaginary Life (1978), based on the story of the poet Ovid, is as beautiful as it is tragic and - along with the gloriously candid Johnno (1975), an elegiac portrait of Brisbane in the 1940s and 1950s - represents him at his most evocative. He has a poet's feel for language and a painter's eye for a visual image. One of those disarmingly quiet originals, a new book from Malouf is a call to read everything he has written, including his outstanding memoir, 12 Edmondstone Street (1985).

IN TWO OF the best stories from this warmly engaged - and engaging - collection, he offers two intriguing responses to that most complex of experiences, death. The title story introduces Jo, a determined young woman intent on embarking on love at its most theatrical. She wants to find it, taste it and hopefully suffer it to the full - she wants the opera.

"She wanted a love that would be overwhelming, that would make a wind-blown leaf of her, a runaway wheel. She was quite prepared to suffer, if that was to be part of it. She would walk barefoot through the streets and howl if that's what love brought her to." She is a layered character, a girl in the big city, Sydney, who has come from the country, "though no one would have called her a country girl". And then, quite brilliantly and with deadpan economy, Malouf adds, "Before that she was from Hungary". Before this story begins, she has already had two serious affairs, "both briefer than she would have wished". Her intensity has been her downfall. "The average bloke, the average Australian . . . was uncomfortable with dramatics. Intimidated. Put off." Finally she meets Mitchell Maze, the maker of the trendy, eccentric, not often finished but much sought after beach houses that everyone appears to want.

For her, the large sun-bleached man who seems set on battering his face and body is the ultimate romantic dream. She moves into his home, a shack on stilts, and prepares to tidy it, and him. Initially, this seems a bizarrely unlikely, almost romantic tale from Malouf as Jo works harder and harder at discovering everything there is to know about her new lover.

Among his mysteries is his former self, a previous incarnation as a child star. Jo delves deeper and deeper. Just when it seems that Malouf has uncharacteristically overplayed this tale of one woman's obsession with a lover who is vague but not deliberately elusive, he injects a real life twist in the form of Mitchell suffering an accident. A few days later he dies.

At the graveside she watches as Josh, his mentally handicapped brother, whom she had never known about, suddenly realises what has happened.

"Some animal understanding - caught from the general emotion around him and become brute fact - had brought home to Josh what it was they were doing there. He began to howl, and the sound was so terrible, so piteous, that all Jo could think of was an animal at the most uncomprehending extreme of physical agony." Just as Josh grasps the reality of his brother's death, Jo comes to a new understanding of love.

DEATH IS ALSO central in Elsewhere, in which a young woman dies. "When Debbie Latecombe died she had not been home to her family for nearly three years." Debbie, it transpires, had been the bright spark, the one who received a good education and made a future for her herself.

Such are the confused thoughts running through the mind of her brother-in-law, Andy, who is married to the dead woman's sister. It is he, not his wife, who is nominated to accompany the father to Sydney for the funeral.

What follows is a study in Andy's perception of how various strangers saw Debbie. For him, she remains the person with whom he shared a long night's drinking in the hours after his mother-in-law had died. At the funeral he feels it is his body that is in the coffin and he watches his father-in-law, aware that it is the old man's daughter who has died. But all the talk is of friends, not of family. "'He's the father,' Andy thinks to himself, 'Someone ought to have mentioned that'." Later at what passes for a wake, Andy is further absorbed into the unreality of the day and introduces himself as Debbie's brother-in-law to a girl who then asks "Who's Debbie?" All the while, though, Andy remains aware of the lone suffering of Harry, the father who had been about his age when Debbie was born.

War Baby returns to a theme that has dominated Malouf. In it, a young man who has been called up for service in Vietnam passes the days before he leaves home. As he plays at becoming a soldier, and wears his dead father's air force great coat, others react to him in contrasting ways.

Memory has always been important to Malouf's meditative work, as may be seen from an earlier collection, Dream Stuff (2000). This time, in a strong, almost conversational collection, he looks to the strange, precise observations from which stories often begin and in his hands, lives emerge.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Every Move You Make By David Malouf Chatto, 244pp. £14.99