Fly Away Peter

Fly Away Peter- David Malouf
4 stars

The first word I think of for this book is lyrical. I could almost hear the orchestration. (It has, in fact been turned into an opera.) It begins quietly with Jim Saddler on his stomach, observing a sandpiper, in the marsh on his employers land. He has an unusual friendship with the wealthy landowner, Ashley Crowther, who employs Jim as a naturalist. The setting is idyllic, and filled with symbolism, on the eve of WW1.

The war begins with a great deal of noise and fanfare (brisk marching music, please). First Jim, and then Ashley are drawn into the debacle of European trench warfare. From here the story becomes a predictable tragic opera. Still poignantly beautiful, still filled with avian symbolism. show more At less than 200 pages, it’s as emotionally moving as many longer books about the first world war. show less

Is there anything better on a lazy Sunday afternoon than a newly purchased book of a new author recently recommended by a trusted friend? Yes, if the novel in question is lyrical, poetic, and so wonderful it can scarcely be put aside for dinner.

David Malouf is of Lebanese and English descent. His family moved to Australia in 1884, and he was born there in 1934. Like one of the main characters in Fly Away Peter, he left Australia for 11 years of study in England. He returned and taught at the University of Sydney until 1977. He now writes full-time, dividing his year between Australia and Tuscany. He has won numerous literary awards, including the first International Dublin Literary prize, and he has been short-listed for the Booker show more Prize.

Malouf is clearly in touch with nature, as this passage illustrates:

"They were so graceful, these creatures, turning their slow heads as the boat glided past and doubled where the water was clear: marsh terns, spotted crake, spur-winged plover, Lewen water rails. And Jim’s voice also held them with its low excitement. He was awkward and rough-looking till they got into the boat. Then he too was light, delicately balanced, and when it was a question of the birds, he could be poetic. They looked at him in a new light and with a respect he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to command" (31).

In stark contrast to the nature scenes in Australia are the graphic and frightening scenes in the trenches of France during World War I. I marvel at Malouf’s ability to describe the dreadful conditions of trench warfare – the rats, the mud, the lice, the stink, the urine, the corpses, the blood, always the blood – and the insanity of war. This passage only hints at the depth of Malouf’s vision when the novel is read as a whole:

"Packed again into a cattletruck, pushed in hard against the wall, in the smell of what he now understood, Jim had a fearful vision. It would go on forever. The war, or something like it with a different name, would go on growing out from here till the whole earth was involved; the immense and murderous machine what was in operation up ahead would require more and more men to work it, more and more blood to keep it running; it was no longer in control. The cattletrucks would keep on right across the century, […] They had fallen, he and his contemporaries, into a dark pocket of time from which there was no escape" (102-3).

Throughout this madness, Jim had the birds to ground him in reality. He kept a notebook of the birds he saw and the songs he heard.

If this is any indication of Malouf’s talents and power as a writer, I can’t wait to get into the rest of his novels, short stories, and poetry.

--Jim, 6/22/08 show less

Two young men meet and connect over birds; one the owner of a wetland who wants to create a sanctuary, the other a bird watcher whom he hires to record the bird activity. The first half of the book compares life to the birds migration and continuity against the odds. WWI breaks out and both men join up at different ranks. We see the war through Jim's (the birdwatcher's) eyes with all its horrors but we also see the birds carrying on. Only one chapter gives Ashley's perspective of the men's resilience. The ending is sad as you would expect from a war story. What a waste of life war is.

"A beautiful book about the horror of war" may seem strange (contradictory), but that decribes "Fly Away Peter" by David Malouf. WWI was very different than the war now on-going, and it is valuable to understand, in both, what the soldiers are experiencing so that we, at home, do not underestimate their sacrifices. In only 134 pages David Malouf takes readers from a quiet countryside to the horror of the trenches. One reads the 18 brief chapters and then is haunted. This is truly a gem of a book. [Sometime I hope to describe Timothy Findley's epic, "The Wars." It also conveys the horror experienced by men on the ground, and goes further: to detail the trauma that faced many who did not die.]

Short, beautiful, haunting. I still think about the story several years later. Found at beach house we rented in North Carolina in 2008.

A really beautiful book. I especially loved the first half of the story, but then a friend of mine really enjoyed the second half.

There are no words to express how beautiful this book is. It's worth reading a hundred times over and you feel differently about it every time.