The Great World: A Portrait of Survival
Categories: Award Winners , Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction
The Great World is a war novel without battle scenes and a POW novel with only a few chapters set in a prison, but quietly and obliquely it conveys the devastation of war through the story of two men drawn into reluctant lifelong friendship by their shared experiences in Malayan and Thai POW camps during World War II.
Digger Keen, a quiet, steady man with an eidetic memory, lives in the house he grew up in in a backwater Australian town. Apart from the war, he has hardly ever left, and for twenty-six years he has kept in his memory the roll call of his fellow soldiers and their fates that he memorized during his years in the prison camp.
Visiting him now and then (more frequently as the years pass) is Vic Curran, who had a hard-luck childhood but has become wealthy in the years since the war. He fastened onto Digger’s close group of buddies in the service and ended up in the prison camp with him.
Digger is the only one who knows the grubby outsider beneath Vic’s successful façade. Their friendship began when Digger awoke from a malarial fever to find Vic unashamedly eating Digger’s ration of rice. An honest recognition of their mutual desire to survive the horrific jungle camp has bound them together even decades since.
The narrative of their friendship spans almost a century of Australian life, tracing Digger and Vic’s parents and moving to the present to describe the lives of their children. Yet it’s those few short chapters set in the POW camp, finally reached in flashback, that are the crux of the whole story.
It’s an extraordinary work of fiction, elegantly constructed and emotionally powerful. Australian author David Malouf is probably better known for his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon, which won several international prizes. But since this is the one I’m remembering sixteen years after reading it, I thought I’d see whether I could coax any of you to read it, too. You won’t forget it soon.
