The Wizard of Aus

Vanities

There are, according to Australian novelist David Malouf, two archetypal Australian narratives. "One is about children lost in the bush. The other is about someone who wanders off from the white community and lives amongst the blacks." In his new book, Remembering Babylon (Pantheon)—thought to be a shooin for the Booker Prize—Malouf combines the two archetypes to tell the story of Gemmy Fairley, a wild-eyed, inarticulate "in-between creature." Thrown off a ship in the mid-1840s when he was a 13-year-old English boy, Gemmy was taken in by Aborigines; 16 years later, he moves back into the world of European settlers. Written in lucid, visionary prose, the fable-like Babylon limns the ways in which we are shaped by our environment. Once described as looking like Groucho Marx crossed with a Lebanese grocer, Malouf is, in fact, the son of a Lebanese Christian and an English Jew of Portuguese extraction—an apt genealogy for a chronicler of displacement.

HENRY ALFORD