A Great Big World Where Does The Time Go

[Elly Ker]

ormallyI don't like novels that want to be sagas, with grand sweeps across time and geography and the meticulous inclusion of the cares and woes of many characters. For this reason I took up David Malouf's novel "The Great World" with a good deal of dread. It turned out to be unfounded. Mr. Malouf is an Australian whose other books include "An Imaginary Life" and "Harlan's Half-Acre." He covers almost three-quarters of a century in "The Great World," which ranges from World War I to the stock market crash of 1988 in the lives of two Australian men and their families. The first is Digger Keen, a country boy, a stolid ferryman and storekeeper with an astounding memory. The other is Digger's friend, Vic Curran, orphaned from a poor mining family and brought up in Sydney by a prosperous factory owner and poet, one of whose daughters Vic eventually marries.

Digger and Vic are unlikely companions. Digger is a man of acute sensitivity but few words, a very honest and unambitious loner. Vic is a striver; boastful and insecure, he's a con man and an entrepreneur. His friendship with Digger comes as a result of his own relentless efforts; Digger wants nothing to do with Vic. "It was always the one person in any company who had not been taken in, who had not succumbed to the tricks he used to win people, that he was drawn to," we are told of Vic. "What he was after was a truth that could not be mocked."

Both men are after a truth that cannot be mocked, and it is this they have in common. They met during World War II and survived three and a half years together as Japanese prisoners of war in Malaya and Thailand, a shared experience that established an undeniable intimacy. Mr. Malouf understands that the personal knowledge most individuals have of history comes from family stories, and in the case of Digger and Vic and many others, from participation in war. The World War II scenes are at the center of this novel, not just because the war altered the progress of societies or redirected history, but because, for the people who were in it, the war became the emotional foundation from which the rest of life took its meanings. So too with families. We learn of Digger's and Vic's backgrounds in copious detail in order to understand them as men.

In making his own intricate connection between history and individual lives, Mr. Malouf is working in the tradition of Tolstoy, so it is no surprise to find Digger, uncharacteristically, reading "War and Peace" at one point. For 26 years after the war ends, Digger spends one night a week in town, at Bondi Junction. There he reads through the library of 700 books that belonged to a fellow P.O.W., Mac, who was killed by the Japanese. Mr. Malouf takes the invocation of Tolstoy a little farther than mere gesture when Digger finds in the pages of "War and Peace" a slip of paper, a list of birds Mac had written "five, ten, fifteen years" before Digger finds it. This forgotten bookmark brings him momentarily back to life:

"Mac's presence, as Digger turned the page and interrupted his reading, imposed itself on the scene. So that for ever after, recalling it, he would think of Mac as having actually been there along with Denisov and Dolghow, and the actual birds, unlikely antipodean angels -- the white throated honey-eater, a flock of fire-tails, a Regent bower bird among others -- would also be there, flashing about the courtyard where young Petya hangs down from the saddle and Denisov grips the railings of the fence and howls his grief."

The list of birds, a worn and fragile scrap, resembles five equally fragmentary letters, belonging to Mac, that Digger carried and read almost daily as a prisoner, safeguarding them, almost as though they were sacred scrolls, after Mac was killed. After the war Digger returned them to their author, Mac's sister-in-law, Iris. Digger and Iris become lovers, and the letters pass into obscurity. These small and delicate texts -- the bookmark and the five short letters -- are forms of witness, like whole novels within the novel in their evocation of passing moments in lives lived. They connect the years.

In "The Great World," Mr. Malouf has attempted a rare thing -- to write a historical novel in a modern psychological style. And he has succeeded. He undermines the conventions of historical narrative in favor of distinct episodes of emotional significance and clarity. Despite his large canvas and grand schemes, he never sacrifices the intensity of his characters' interior worlds. He jumps back and forth in time so freely that, except in the wartime sections, it often takes some guesswork to figure out when the action is taking place or how old the characters have become.

"The Great World" is occasionally too digressive; reading it, you feel at times that you are taking two steps back for every one you take forward. The pace is further slowed by long discursive passages of background and analysis that might have been pared down without significant loss. Yet all of it, cumbersome and beautiful, moves forward with an ever-accumulating power. Even with its narrative bulkiness, "The Great World" captures the tactile, minute-to-minute reality of everyday life.

"I see you've been in the papers again," Digger would say, and Vic, though he was pleased Digger had seen it -- he was still hungry for admiration, he could never have enough of it -- would make a face. "Oh, the papers," he'd say. "You can't take any notice of the papers." And to make up a little for the gap between them, he began to tell Digger stories, frank, light-hearted ones, of his activities out there among the cannibals, laying it on pretty thick at times and delighting in Digger's expressions of disbelief, of disapproval too, often enough, and playing . . . for sympathy.

All right, this particular canard has had all its feathers pulled off many times. I claim no originality. People explain it over and over on blogs. Every twenty seconds, somebody asks about it, and the explainers go to work.

It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?

For when they brought him [= Alexander, still a boy] newes that his father had taken some famous city, or had won some great battell, he was nothing glad to hear it, but would say to his playfellowes: Sirs, my father will have all, I shall have nothing left me to conquer with you, that shall be ought worth. For he delighting neither in pleasure nor riches, but only in valliantnes and honor, thought, that the greater conquests and realmes his father should leave him, the lesse he should have to do for himselfe. And therfore, seing that his fathers dominions and Empire increased dayly more and more, perceiving all occasion taken from him to do any great attempt: he desired no riches nor pleasure but warres and battells, and aspired to a signory, where he might win honor.

An other time also when he was in Spayne, reading the history of Alexanders actes, when he had red it, he was sorrowfull a good while after, and then burst out in weeping. His frends seeing that, marveled what should be the cause of his sorow. He aunswered them, Doe ye not thinke sayd he, that I have good cause to be heavie, when king Alexander being no older than my selfe is now, had in old time wonne so many nations and contries: and that I hitherunto have done nothing worthy of my selfe?

A Great Big World is an American musical duo from New York[1] made up of singer/songwriters Ian Axel and Chad King and signed to Epic Records. The group is best known for their single "This Is the New Year", which was performed by the cast in an episode of Glee and reached the Billboard Mainstream Top 40 chart in May 2013,[2] and their worldwide hit "Say Something", particularly after recording it as a duet collaboration with Christina Aguilera. The duet peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100.

Ian Axel and Chad King met at New York University, where they were attending the Steinhardt Music Program.[3] Both were music business students and Axel is said to have convinced King to write a song together. King agreed to work with Axel after hearing him sing. They both wrote and performed songs together prior to Axel embarking on a solo career in which he released an independent album featuring songs that were all co-written by King.[3]

In 2011, their song "This Is the New Year" was licensed to various television networks and was used as the theme song for MTV's I Used to Be Fat as well as being featured on The Amazing Race, ESPN, One Tree Hill, and Good Morning America.[4] Ian Axel and Chad King went on national tour and performed as the openers for Ingrid Michaelson, Matthew Morrison (Glee), and Five for Fighting.[3]

In June 2013, they were picked as Elvis Duran's Artist of the Month and were featured on NBC's Today where they performed live their song "This Is the New Year". The song "Say Something" was featured in the final episode of the US dance competition So You Think You Can Dance on September 3, 2013, and released digitally the same day. It climbed to number 20 on iTunes in the United States the next day. The song was subsequently re-recorded featuring Christina Aguilera after she heard the song, and this version was released on November 4, 2013, and that version reached number 1 on the iTunes charts.[7] The following evening, A Great Big World and Aguilera gave the premiere live TV performance of the song on the NBC television series The Voice.[8] The song reached No. 1 on the digital song chart the next day with 189,000 copies sold for the week.[9] The video was released on November 19, 2013.[10] In November 2013, it was announced that A Great Big World would be performing at the annual Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. The same month, they performed for the first time at the American Music Awards with Aguilera.[11]

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