Harland's Half Acre

Wonderful book especially the second time I read it. It is compassionate in tone, showing reverence for growing up in straitened circumstance and the mysteries surrounding that early experience of making sense of one's life. The reader is lead to sharing in sympathy with characters who are all flawed or damaged through accidents that struck them.
This is one of my favourite Australian novels. Malouf is full of love for characters, in the same way that Harland is driven by his love for his family, one broken by accident and bad luck.

I have read some really good books this year. Here's another one. It's taken me a long time to read my first David Malouf and I'm now looking forward to perusing much more of his oeuvre.

This is not a plot-driven book, so if that is something you need I'd probably advise giving it a miss. Me, it doesn't worry me in the least. I enjoyed following the intertwining paths of two lives, from the 1930s (I think...) to the 80s (I surmise). Malouf treats every character with sympathy. Nobody is perfect, and some are less perfect than others, but even those characters with the greatest personality flaws are revealed to have some innate humanity that evokes compassion.

The writing is consistently gorgeous - evocative, sensitive and frequently show more breathtaking. While reading I sometimes mark pages with particularly moving passages. I soon decided that in the case of Harland's Half-Acre I'd have to mark every page, so didn't bother.

I look forward to the day, some years in the future, when I have forgotten the details of this book and can read it again with the same degree of wonder. show less

It’s been too long since David Malouf’s last novel Ransom (see my review) and readers who love his work will be delighted by the reissue of Harland’s Half Acre by Vintage Books Australia.

First published in 1984 when Malouf (b.1934) was fifty, Harland’s Half Acre brings us a world long gone even when he wrote it. A world where motherless children were split up and farmed out to relations bereaved in The Great War, while the remaining children lived in grubby chaos in a single-roomed shack. A world where bread pudding was a celebratory luxury and finishing school was an ambition reserved only for the brightest one, and then only if someone in the family did well enough to fund it. A world where one wife dies from an infected wound show more caused by a rose thorn and her successor Sally – having produced three more little children in quick succession – dies from the Spanish Flu. Malouf introduces his story with the childhood and adolescence of Frank Harland growing up on the remnants of his family’s former prosperity, where he is sustained by the garrulous fantasies of his feckless father, a man himself chained to the drudgery of an unprofitable dairy farm and five motherless boys.

No doubt childhoods like these have been the subject matter of many sorrowful or bitter memoirs, but Frank Harland’s life has its compensations and this first chapter is a testament to the human spirit. In the subdued house of his Aunt Else and Uncle Fred where the shirts of their only son Ned still hang in the cupboard, Frank learns to draw and so discovers the art that sustains him throughout his long life. And when reunited with his family after Sally’s death, he visits the ruins of the family’s fortunes lost to drink, gambling and mismanagement, and invests his father’s nostalgic stories with an imaginative reconstruction of their lives, creating a ‘memory’ of grand people in a grand house not much like what it really was. These ideas of former glory couple with a profound sense of responsibility to his family and form his ambition to somehow restore their fortunes. For all their faults he loves them dearly, and this love of his family is the making of the man.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2013/03/11/harlands-half-acre-by-david-malouf/ show less

Australië, eerste helft 20ste eeuw, gepassioneerde liefde van een boerenzoon zijn familie en land, met als achtergrond de oorlogsperikelen. Prachtige tekening van de warme faialiebanden tussen de jonge (half)broers Harland. Gonzende natuurbeschrijvingen. Een aanrader!