Critic forum at the upcoming 2009 Congress, CACLALS continues its tradition of paying sustained attention to the decolonizing work so necessary to the instituting of just relations between Aboriginal peoples and the newcomers in Canada.

 

 

Don Randall. David Malouf. Contemporary World Writers. Manchester University Press, 2007. 222 pages. $26.95.

 

Review by John Eustace, Acadia University

 

Over the years, I’ve found books from the Contemporary World Writers series useful in both my research and my teaching. They tend to offer what series editor John Thieme describes as “authoritative introductions” to contemporary writers, introductions more often than not informed by current approaches and debates in postcolonial studies. But they also go beyond their introductory imperatives, making original contributions to the contemporary scholarship on the authors they consider. Don Randall’s contribution to the series, David Malouf, is no exception in this regard. While providing comprehensive treatments of Malouf’s significant works, Randall navigates his own course through the works of the sometimes controversial Australian writer to reveal an evolving “ethics of subjectivity” (29) at its core.

 

After an introductory chapter that situates Malouf and his evolving ethics of subjectivity within a continuum of literary influences – Kipling, White, and Coetzee – Randall begins to show how Malouf’s poetry prefigures his later and more complex negotiations of subjectivity in prose. To this purpose, he traces the author’s “image repertoire” (14) through a good number of poems, focusing on his concerns with edges and margins, place, body, transformations, genealogy, Aboriginality, and the erotic. And the subsequent chapters dealing with Malouf’s fiction do indeed rediscover this repertoire in various forms as they trace the author’s evolving sense of the subject.

 

Despite its importance to the rest of the book in laying this groundwork, however, this is also the book’s weakest chapter. Randall is clearly capable of handling the poetry well, as his most thorough and satisfying reading of the erotic in “The Crab Feast” near the chapter’s end attests. So I would attribute the weakness in this instance to a combination of factors: in part, to the seemingly impossible task of treating several volumes of poetic work in the space of 17 pages (a problem he contends with again when treating several volumes of short stories in the penultimate, and second weakest chapter); in part, to the introductory project of cataloguing the repertoire of images; and in part, to the preliminary nature of the images themselves.

 

Randall’s best and most original work lies in his treatment of Malouf’s novels. He begins with a chapter on Malouf’s early, first-person narratives, “The Narratives of the ‘I’”, treating them chronologically before breaking with chronology to read his final first-