The Conversations at Curlow Creek

by David Malouf

Overview

A new work of fiction by the author of Remembering Babylon. It is 1827, and, in a remote hut high on the plains of New South Wales, two strangers spend the night in talk. One, an illiterate Irishman, and ex-convict and bushranger, is to be hanged at dawn. The other is the police officer who has been sent to supervise the hanging. As the night wears on, the two men share memories and uncover unlikely connections between their lives. 240 pp. Author tour. 20,000 print.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679779056
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/12/1998
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	1 VINTAGE
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

David Malouf is the author of ten novels and six volumes of poetry. His novel The Great World was awarded both the prestigious Commonwealth Prize and the Prix Femina Estranger. Remembering Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

Editorial Reviews

Call it the Merchant/Ivory syndrome: "My, what beautiful wallpaper!" Malouf, whose last novel, Remembering Babylon, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, spreads thick his beautiful, evocative prose in The Conversations at Curlow Creek, but the swatches hang together in a slightly mismatched and irritating pattern, never cohering into a whole.

The plot, as Malouf sets it up, is interesting: Two Irishman - one a career soldier, the other a rebel peasant - spend the night in a hut in the outback of Australia in 1827, the officer present to oversee the dawn hanging of the peasant. The peasant had wanted a priest, and he's ready to pour his heart out; the soldier wants to go home to claim the girl of his dreams.

The majority of the book, however, is given over to a backstory that would've made Dickens proud. Every last detail of the soldier's upbringing amidst the Irish gentry is recounted. We learn of the tragic death of his opera-singer parents, his adoption by eccentric landowners, his love for the wealthy, smart and reckless neighbor girl, as well as his having to raise his adopted parents' son. There is an inevitable triangle between the soldier, the girl and the son, a three way psychological tug of war for affection. The soldier is all order. The neighbor girl is all fire. The young boy is all rebellion. The soldier traipses around the world to exorcise his demons and to find the inner spark that will win the girl. In New South Wales he learns that the boy he raised has become a rebel leader. By the time he gets to Curlow Creek the only survivor of the young man's band is a lone peasant to be hung in the morning.

Unfortunately, little is exchanged between these characters. Instead there are many poetic passages about rivers, trees and horses. The central theme - the inner conflict of chaos and order - is merely glimpsed in a few compelling passages. With this kind of book, you forget why you are reading it and find it easy to put aside when your eyes glaze over as you stare at the pretty words. -- Salon

Rob Spillman

An audacious and deeply moving meditation in fictional form on such essential matters as freedom and identity, explored in a series of conversations and recollections.

Most of the conversations take place between two men, one a career soldier sent to oversee an execution, the other the stoic outlaw about to be hanged. Malouf, an Australian writer, has, over the course of eight previous novels (including Remembering Babylon, 1993, and The Great World, 1991) developed a supple, precise prose style and a great talent for revealing the philosophical underpinnings of dramatic events. This new work, set in Australia in 1827, in the dusty outback of New South Wales, once again rings some startling changes on a grim situation. Carney, the outlaw, is the only one of a group of "bushrangers" to be taken alive. An Irishman and ex-convict, he grudgingly begins to talk about his hard, harassed life as the soldier, Michael Adair, questions him about the gang. Adair, also Irish, is gradually moved to a recognition of Carney's fierce, if inchoate, devotion to freedom, and stirred to reflect on the ways in which need and fear can shape our lives. Adair, orphaned as an infant, raised by a friend of his mother's on a great estate, nurses sharp guilts and regrets about his own past. As Adair and Carney spend the long night before his execution talking, sharing confidences, the tough young soldiers accompanying Adair tell a variety of tales, some profane, some troubling, about their own lives. The execution goes off as planned, but Adair, a deeply meditative man, and a convincingly good one, is profoundly altered by the event.

Using material that might have been merely gaudy or melodramatic in less skilled hands, Malouf has shaped a terse, intelligent, resonant meditation on life and loss, again demonstrating that he's one of the brightest and most original of contemporary novelists.

Kirkus Reviews

"Beyond the futility of the law and the loneliness of the human condition, Malouf distils a triumphant beauty.... [His] prose, rich and mellifluous, conjures myth and memory to climax in an ending as elusive as the apparent reversal of the moon above an alien night." -The Globe and Mail

"Enthralling... Malouf pulls from this tightly restricted set of circumstances a far-ranging tale of high emotion that unfolds in a series of rhapsodic passages." -NOW

"Malouf has created a journey into human truth.... He strips away illusions and deference and allows two men to find common humanity against the vastness of a menacing and unbridled environment. In rich, poetic language, he turns a sporadic night-long conversation ... into a poignant and searing summation of man's place in the universe." -Kitchener-Waterloo Record

"Compelling and powerful.... This is a terse, intelligent and rewarding work that does not slip easily from the reader's mind." -Hamilton Spectator

From the Publisher