i loved this book. incredibly powerful and emotional. it made me think of pow’s in a totally different way. confronting, challenging and ultimately incredibly rewarding.
not a pretty story and certainly none of the cliches we would expect in a story with this setting.
5 stars.

An engaging, well written, eventful, interesting character based novel about two Australian men over a period of sixty years. Vic and Digger are very different characters who shared experiences as prisoners of war in Malaya and Thailand during the Second World War. Vic grows up in a wealthy family in Sydney and Digger grows up with his mother and sister at a river crossing just outside of suburban Sydney. Their experiences during the imprisonment is well described. After the war both men spend two or three years of randomly wandering around, eventually settling down to live very different lives. Vic and Digger are survivors who have lost their innocence and keep their thoughts to themselves.

A very worthwhile reading experience.

This book won the 1991 Miles Franklin Award.

Hunt a Book

ANZLL discussion.
Didn't write any journal entries on this book, but thought it was classic Malouf, very haunting.

My book club's book for June. There is some wonderful writing here. Just a few examples:

She had a war on with the magpies. She had lots of wars, but this was her fiercest and most continuous...Big black-and-white brustes with sharp little eyes and even sharper beaks, she hated them, and wondered really what they had been put in the world for except to be a torment to smaller creatures. They strutted about as if they owned the place and were just waiting to take over...Black and white, like bloody nuns...muttering their magpie rosary.

That's not at all about magpies, is it?

and

...her tendency, as he thought of it, to put on the dog -- maintaining a bit of decency was how she would put it...

Two people fully characterized, lifelong conflict and all, in a single phrase.

and

Meanwhile the wheels went spinning, gravity insisted, and rider and machine slewed off into the ditch.

"Gravity insisted." Well, of course it does, but when has any author ever put it so simply, so elegantly, and so amusingly?

and a terrific passage describing the march of Australian soldiers out of Singapore, loaded down with everything they can carry into what will prove to be a three-year exile as prisoners of the Japanese.

By nightfall even the dullest and most stubborn of them had learned something, and what he had learned could be picked up, weighed, turned over and a price put upon it, by the thousands of scavengers who moved along with them, snapping up whatever they cast aside or dropped, and would be laid out that night under lamps in shanty shops -- as proof of what till now had been barely graspable: an extraordinary surrender of power, made one on paper and once in a form you could actually see and lay your hands on; in the world of commodities...It was a general stripping. In it, whether they knew it or not, they had been making decisions on which their lives would depend. Everything a man had grasped about human nature (including his own), and the unpredictability of things, was in the choice between a six-bob alarm clock and a pair of scuffed but serviceable boots...At a point back there they had stepped, each one of them, across a line where the weight of each thing in the world, even the smallest, had been added to; but they themselves were lighter.[emphasis mine]

War, materialism, capitalism, love, death, frontiers of nations and of the human experience, they're all here.

That said, I probably wouldn't have finished this book were it not a book club book. I'm not interested in psychological studies (Just get on with life, wouldja?) and I'm even less interested in narratives that loop around themselves, going backward and forward in time. The Great World reminds me of a novel by a Japanese author whose name I cannot for the life of me remember, where the narrative kept jumping back and forth along the lives of its characters so that you never knew what day or year it was. Again, that said, there are some interesting payoffs when you see the same scenes from the viewpoints of different characters.

I also felt like I had read this novel before, to wit: A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. That was a much more commercial novel, this is a much more literary one. The former marches the narrative inexorably forward even with a large, interpolatory (I think I just made up that word) flashback that takes up the central portion of the novel. It's nowhere near as well written, but it was a much easier and much more engaging read.

I've read this book twice. Although the storyline would spring forwards and back - I enjoyed Malouf's general descriptions and turns of phrase.

“‘What a weird bloke he is,' Digger thought. Honestly, I'll never get the hang of him. One moment he was all smooth impenetrability, and the next he opened up and gave himself away - but only, Digger thought, when he was afraid he might have lost you.”

A very thoughtful and moving story about Australians before,during and after WWII.I found it a bit hard to get into but it was worth persevering.The writing is precise and poetical with deep analyses of the individuals involved.It covers the Depression years, WW II,Changi and the Burma railway and post war prosperity through the lives of two men and their families.A great novel but not an easy read.

I am glad to have turned to David Malouf at this stage in life. Others I know recoil at his name, having suffered through dreary forced reading in high school. While I love how he vividly writes of physical spaces and their relationship with a character's inner journey, there is little more tiresome than being forced to decode and recite back the tricks of the authorial trade just before lunchtime in a broiling schoolroom.

The Great World is a fantastic read. As ever, Malouf writes in a lyrical and mesmerising tone. He beautifully ties together several markedly different stories across decades and continents. Moreover, he humanised the inhuman, and while there is a great deal of pain and trauma here, it's conveyed with such a lightness of touch and loving tone that you suspect some alchemy at play.

Can you guess that I loved this book?

Although utterly different in approach, tone and subject matter, I couldn't help but think of Sally Rooney's Normal People, which I felt a worthy but flawed novel. What made me think of this was the relationship between Digger and Vic, two traumatised characters with whom we share their rich and nuanced inner lives, yet remain burdened by the lack of a capacity to articulate their thoughts, pain and dreams with those around them. Where I was never quite convinced by Rooney's book, this one had me utterly compelled.

A beautiful novel.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

It's many years since I read "The Great World" but it left a lasting impression. The novel has a grand sweep and Malouf's prose is elegant although fairly spare.

A fabulous read with big themes as the reader follows the lives of two Australian men, who met in a WWII POW camp. Their lives and those of their family are explored. Relationships to each other and the world are central.

As with my love of Patrick White: so to Malouf. This novel is much more 'novel like' and less prose heavy like 'Ransom', 'An Ordinary Life' and even 'Remembering Babylon.' He taps into the profane, the beautiful, masculinities, war, Mateship, love – all the great themes — in such a beautiful manner. The characters all
possess such an innate charm and haunting ability to read and understand one another. It's a ripping yarn, full of wonder at the world and infused with his beautiful spiritualism.