TWO men spend the night talking, but there is nothing casual or planned about their dialogue. For one of them, Carney, ex convict and, bush ranger, the night means the last hours which separate him from death. His companion, Adair, a police officer, finds himself in the role of comforter and confessor, aware that he is later to become executioner. The story is stark, yet much of the power of David Malouf's hauntingly moving new novel, The Conversations at Curlow Creek (Chatto, £14.99 in UK), lies in the beauty of the prose.
Both men attempt to arrive at some understanding of themselves. Carney, the prisoner, tries to remember the wasted life which has brought him to such a finale, while Adair not only reviews his own past but needs to find answers which, ironically, only Carney can supply. Set in New South Wales in 1827, this novel is less about the creating of colonial Australia than about people who came there in an attempt to escape from their previous lives. Carney and Adair are Irish. Yet their experiences of Ireland are as different as their present circumstances.
Adair is the central figure. His resentful subordinates complain about his strictness, referring to him as "Mister bloody punctilious" behind his back. The troopers are an edgy bunch with their own internal tensions. Even as early as 1827, a racial hierarchy is already in place. "Before Jed Snelling was killed they had been four - the black who was with them, Jonas, did not count."
The brutal death of Snelling is described with a delicate lyricism. As the fatal spear is pulled from his neck, Langhurst, one of the young troopers, "who was looking right into Jed Snelling's eyes, had seen his soul come out with it Seen it. That was a fact. And it wasn't just a breath that came out on a last releasing sigh. It was a knot, a thing the size of a fist, that had to be torn out of the flesh with a violence that was terrific In tone and setting, the novel is similar to Malouf's IMPAC prize winner and former Booker contender, Remembering Babylon (1993), yet there is an entirely different dimension. The earlier book is strongly Australian, whereas The Conversations at Curlow Creek, with its rich physical sense of the New South Wales landscape, unexpectedly changes direction to offer a variation on a theme once familiar in Irish fiction, the Big House Novel. Stiff, formal Adair is instinctively watchful and observant, having learned to be so at an early age. He is conscious of Carney's every movement and gesture.
Malouf presents the two men at varying stages - and levels of self understanding. Having at first mistaken Adair for a priest, Carney gradually appoints him as his confessor. Malouf's skilful characterisation conveys Carney's simplicity, dignity and calm acceptance of the death he is facing. He says to Adair: ... you're an educated man, I see that, an' I'm ignorant. I never learned to read, like . . . Nothing. There's a lot that happens in the world that a feller like me doesn't ever get the bearings of."
There is nothing sentimental about Malouf's handling of the interaction between the two men. From the outset, Adair presents himself as a man of little or no imagination. This may be so, yet his memory is all powerful. Orphaned as a baby when his flamboyant professional opera singer parents drown, he is rescued by one of his mother's larger than life old school friends, Aimee Connellan. Home becomes a grand house on a wooded estate in Galway. She has had many pregnancies yet none of her babies has survived, so Adair becomes a surrogate son and is so important to Aimee that when she finally produces a living child she has no love to spare. Life at Ellersley is as chaotic as it is eccentric.
Aimee's son Fergus develops into so fantastic a presence that it seems he may engulf the novel. Adair's former life is so removed from his present one that at times during the flashback sequences it is as if one were reading a different novel. Carney the runaway, Adair the poor boy given a rich childhood; the personalities of Garrety and Langhurst; the old world and the new; the past and the present; romance and reality - the narrative abounds with dualism and contrast.
Love is the reason Adair finds himself sitting in a dank but with a condemned man. Like a knight on a quest, he has come searching for answers in a new land - "What did he think of this country? It wasn't one. It was a place that was still being made inhabitable." Adair does have an imagination, and it objects to the harsh reality that justice demands.
An Imaginary Life (1978), Fly Away Peter (1982), Harland's Half Acre (1984) and, of course, Remembering Babylon, all testify to the beauty, humanity, wisdom and singular vision of Malouf's work. The Conversations at Curlow Creek is a gentle, almost elegiac portrait of a man caught and tested by circumstances. It also confirms Malous status as one of the finest contemporary writers.
