Reviewed by Malcolm Walker.
 

There is an old writer's adage that recourse to a dream as an explanation or deus ex machina in a short story, is to stoop to primary school tactics.  In this collection, Malouf's  first since Antipodes (1985), what at first might seem an uninviting prospect  -  nine stories linked via the theme of dreams or dreaming  -  becomes a series of beautifully worked pieces.  Drawing the reader into the multifarious world of the characters, these stories leave the reader with a feeling these people have populated their dreams long ago but were somehow forgotten or overlooked, only to be found again amongst the pages of this wonderful anthology.  Malouf is a writer of masterful intent, one of our best; one of those exact, estimably succinct writers, who, without using a single metaphor or simile, manage to conjure plausible worlds with a warmth that belies their precision. Each story measures its length to the last comma, and Malouf, rarely outstaying his welcome, manages to turn material that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could have been annoyingly banal or whimsical, into something quietly profound.

 
In 'Dream Stuff', the collection's eponymous story, the reader is introduced to a startling concept, an urban myth perhaps, but one that seeps into the dreams of the story's protagonist, expatriate author Colin Lattimer.  This is the notion that late at night, street kids were picked up in trucks, blindfolded, and then transported to harvest 'the green stuff, the dream stuff' somewhere out in the marijuana fields of the Brisbane hinterland.  Lattimer, however, lives amongst other dreams and nightmares.  Shadowed by his father's war-time death and an ill-fitting guilt, he wanders pre-Fitzgerald Brisbane  -  Malouf's writing brilliantly evoking the night-shrouded decay and tropical fecundity of the city, a place where 'everything spread quickly - germs, butter, rumours'  -   only to find himself enmeshed in a dreamlike series of mishaps that end with him being fouled, like a piece of river flotsam, between a couple of burly detectives in the watch-house.  It is the presence of these officers  -  one whose brutality '...like his coarseness, was assumed. Having no necessary cause, it would also have no limit.'  - that lend the nightmarish undercurrent to the story.  Lattimer is a man at war with himself.  In this case the war is between the writer's present and past: 'He no longer tormented himself with the wish that things had been different.  They had made him what he was. But he did want to know why the world he had grown up in had been so harsh and uncompromising, and had made so little room for love.'  It is, like many of the stories in this collection, a story of war and its casualties, a theme that underpins Malouf's more obvious one of dreams.  But the wars, the real ones, are hidden on the periphery, mentioned in passing and merely hinting at the conflict that dominated the childhood of many writers and readers of Malouf's generation: World War II.

 Malouf's stories are often seen through the eyes of children.  In 'At Schindler's', a small boy supposes he has encountered his dead father.  The love that occurs in these stories speaks of those bonds and disconcerting alliances that were made when we were young, and which we seem to have grown out of or severed, but which come back to haunt us in times of conflict or upheaval.  Crisis, in one shape or form, has long been viewed by writers and critics alike as the generating engine behind the short story.  Malouf understands the crises that infect the lives of very ordinary people.  His handling of these situations and of his character's responses to them, provides a mirror in which his readers can observe not only themselves but society at large.  Yet again, as he does in so many of his novels, Malouf forces us to explore and to question the myriad identities that we carry within us:  the labyrinth of the self, the cocoon of adulthood that has entrapped the child we once were  -  those sorry or self-important spaces in which we hide from ourselves.  In 'Great Day', an elderly man muses on the pianist he might have become if circumstances had been different.

 Malouf is no less certain with his female characters.  In 'Sally's Story', the central character, who is a "comfort" woman for American troops on respite leave from Vietnam, allows a nascent warmth and tenderness to ebb slowly back into her life as she tries to locate feelings have been leached by her small-town upbringing.  Or the young girl in 'Closer' who bridges her separation from her urbane but AIDS-carrying Uncle Charles through her dream-life.

 In 'Closer', the warfare is of a particularly unpleasant variety.  It is a kind of formal trench warfare, that peculiar form of family conflict that stems from religious bigotry and hypocrisy.   Humorous and skilfully wrought, it is the story of Amy, a nine year old from a strict Pentecostal background, who experiences the stirrings of religious doubt and nascent humanism as she tries to reconcile her love for her uncle with her family's rigid teachings.

 In  a number of the stories the dreamer is rudely awoken. Their life is not as they would like it.  There is a chasm between their dreams and those of the real world, one that they need to bridge if they are to step beyond what they are or were, into what they can become.  This  other theme within the book, reconciliation  -  subtle and ambiguous in its presence  -  nonetheless gives these stories a confidence, optimism and humanity.  In writing this way, Malouf somehow manages to confer both the broader and the more particular truths within all our lives.
 

(c) Malcolm Walker.  All Rights Reserved.