Fly Away Peter

by David Malouf

In this shimmering work of imagination, one of Australia's most honored writers conjures a single still moment on the edge of the 20th century in which two unlikely people share a friendship. When Ashley Crowther returns to Australia to manage his father's property, he discovers a timeless landscape of kingfishers and ibises; he also meets Jim Saddler, the young woodsman who becomes Ashley's guide to his inheritance. Together they discard the differences of personality and class to enter a partnership of wonder. But when war breaks out in Europe, Jim and Ashley are drawn into obscene enterprise of the trenches, where death falls from the sky and burrows out of the earth. In telling the story of these men, Fly Away Peter combines overwhelmingly sensual imagery with an unblinking consciousness of the worst that history can inflict to produce a novel of phosphorescent beauty.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Historical Fiction, War, Historical, School, Literature

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

David Malouf was a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work had garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
Malouf had taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he drew on both Australian and European influences in his work. He was widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and had been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Reviews

[zed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this an easy read and at 133 pages it was perfect length. The first half of the book is in the bird lands of the sunny south east Queensland coastal wetlands and then leads to the Western Front of The Great War. It was interesting to read of pre–Great War Brisbane CBD landmarks that still exited into the late 1970s, when I was an apprentice in George Street. The Lands Office Hotel was the first place I ever had a beer as a 16-year-old, as myself and another apprentice somehow ordered a pot of XXXX and were never asked our ages! I even recall the Criterion, we may have sneaked in there. All gone in the name of progress.

The main character Jim’s transition from these familiar places into the war feels all the more devastating due to the novel's quiet, deliberate pacing. It is deeply contemplative and finely attuned to the minutiae of Jim’s natural world as a birdwatcher, leaving a sad impression in the end. David Malouf is one of my favourite Brisbane authors and seems to me to able to write about the fragility all around us, be that our human connections and our surrounds.

Brisbane literary walk 15 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bird's Eye View

This is an exquisite little novella that begins in beauty on the coast of Queensland and ends (almost) in the mud of Flanders on the other side of the world. Birds, of course, make similar migrations; this is one of the things that fascinates 20-year-old Jim Saddler as he studies birds with borrowed binoculars, noting their species, their habits, their comings and goings. He strikes up a friendship with Ashley Crowther, the young owner of this stretch of Australian farmland, and also with Imogen Harcourt, a middle-aged photographer with a similar passion. But then the 1914 War breaks out, and Jim and Ashley sign up, in different regiments and at different ranks.

There are many books about the Western Front. The ingredients are all much the same: boredom, companionship, carnage. What makes one stand out from another is the quality of the writing, the particular point of view, and whatever aspects of normal life the author chooses to set against the obscenity of war. The last book I read about Flanders, for example, Sebastian Barry's A Long, Long Way, was written with a rich Irish poetry, kept its point of view very much at ground level, and set the War against the very different Irish fight for independence back home. Malouf's writing is also poetic, but simpler, and he excels particularly at describing the surroundings of the war, as in the following:

Often, as Jim later discovered, you entered the war through an ordinary looking gap in a hedge. One minute you were in a ploughed field, with snowy troughs between ridges that marked old furrows and peasants off at the edge of it digging turnips or winter greens, and the next you were through the hedge and on duckboards, and although you could look back and still see the farmers at work, or sullenly watching as the soldiers passed over their land and went slowly below ground, there was all the difference in the world between your state and theirs. They were in a field and very nearly at home. You were in the trench system that led to the war.

But it is Malouf's juxtaposition of the battlefield to the Australian nature reserve that is so daring. For there is no possibility of a literal resolution that connects them. Indeed, Malouf seems to avoid following narrative links; Ashley and Jim barely meet again, and the biplane so prominently featured on the cover ultimately serves only to offer Jim a metaphor for his own bird's eye view on life. Yet it is an important metaphor. The two halves of the book portray beauty and destruction with memorable power. But the coherence of the novel as a whole depends upon the final chapter, which returns to Imogen Harcourt watching the birds among the sand dunes. I had to sleep on this and re-read it for it to fully work, but now I see the beauty in her simple understanding of the life that connects both birds and man.

[Blake · Rating 1 out of 5]

I laughed when Jim died

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This follows the same formula as his "Remembering Babylon." First, the story. Here, a simple country lad who's into bird watching. David Malouf throws in a possible love interest, most likely pretty, who does photography. Also a rich, young man who becomes his friend. Both guys goes to war (World War 1). The contrast, from the peaceful idyll of their natural world in Australia to the numbing horrors of trench warfare. From colorful birds to rotting corpses. Some characters die, untimely, needlessly. Finally, towards the end, a couple of paragraphs where the point of everything that has happened is distilled, becomes crystal clear, powerfully written like you'd want to copy or memorize them. Like this one, where the girl-photographer, remembering Jim Saddler (the bird watcher) in that certain pose of his when he was closely examining a picture of a bird she showed him the first time they met--

"It was that intense focus of his being, it's ME, Jim Saddler, that struck her with grief, but was also the thing--and not simply as an image either--that endured. That in itself. Not as she might have preserved it in a shot she had never in fact taken, nor even as she had held it, for so long, as an untaken image in her head, but in itself, as it for its moment was. That is what life meant, a unique presence, and it was essential in every creature. To set anything above it, birth, position, talent even, was to deny to all but a few among the infinite millions what was also, in the end, most moving. A life wasn't FOR anything. It simply was."

The meaning of life in a short, bittersweet paragraph! This is what makes literature great. With a captive, addicted, gullible readers it can solve life's great mysteries by lying beautifully.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A beautifully written poignant novella about Jim Saddler, a young self contained man, with a good understanding of the bird life of an estuary on the Queensland Gold Coast in the 1910s. Jim feels obliged to join the army when World War One breaks out. The first part of the novella describes life on the Queensland Gold Coast, the second part on Jim’s experiences on the Western front in WWI.

This book was first published in 1982.

[Victoria Circelli · Rating 1 out of 5]

Please don't do this to yourself, unless your English class makes you...

[Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another small gem of a novel where every word feels considered ; handled with the respect of a craftsman used to harnessing their power .

Looking at WW1 through the experience of an Australian farm labourer whose fascination with birds provides him with an absolute sense of wonder and perpetual delight , we move from a world of endless skies and migration to the muddy earth of Flanders . From a timeless bliss to a everlasting hell .

Here we have the unnamed thousands in a reverse migration , not belonging , surrounded by the harsh machinery of war and entombed by a filthy and desecrated soil .

It's hard to imagine anyone writing about landscapes and the natural world any better . Even in the midst of Flanders skylarks still fling their song to the skies .

[Sarah (is clearing her shelves) · Rating 2 out of 5]

20/09 - Had to read this for year 12 English and I didn't really understand it and therefore didn't enjoy it. I find both situations strange as I am usually drawn to Australian war stories, fiction and non-fiction. Maybe it deserves a re-read with my older, more mature brain...one day.

14/4/16 - New Review due to Reread

20/4 - I think this might be the least enjoyable war story I've read. It took till page 80 (of 138) before we got to anything interesting, before that it was all about Jim and his fascination with the birds. Malouf is reasonably well-known for his poetry and all that work writing poetry was evident in this novel. Large chunks of this book were page-long run-on sentences that seemed to go on forever and he's never met a comma he didn't want to use to death. I can see why I didn't understand or like this 14 years ago and I can also see why my English teacher was doing cartwheels at the chance to get us to 'analyse' this pile of existentialist (she described it thus) waffle (isn't it an English teacher's job to get us to love reading by forcing us to read books assured to make us hate it?, fortunately I was able to become attached to books before English teachers came into my life). I won't be reading any more of Malouf's work and this book is getting donated to a hopefully more appreciative home.

2016 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge Category: A Book Set in Your Home State (Queensland)

[Bec · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fly Away Peter is the story of Jim Saddler, an avid birdwatcher living in Queensland in the early 1900s. When the war arrives in 1914, he enlists, and, travelling to France, becomes a bitter soldier fighting a losing war, while musing on the meaning of life. And that's about all that happens.

The first time I read this book, I didn't like it very much. I thought it was boring, slow-paced, with too many descriptions of birds and a rather tame description of the battlefield.
But then we had to analyse this book for my english class this year, and I can now say with total honesty, that I still do not like it very much.

But I can respect it now, and definitely respect Malouf as a writer. The whole of Fly Away Peter is crafted to perfection: not a single sentence goes by without subtle foreshadowing or a clever metaphor. The overarching theme of this novel is Jim's journey from innocence to darkness, and Malouf uses every opportunity to insert a metaphor, a simile, or a piece of symbolism that only becomes apparent on a second reading.

For those reasons, I have to say that I did not enjoy Fly Away Peter as I would usually enjoy a novel, but I can certainly admire it for its fine craftsmanship, its attention to detail, and for the fantastic, subtle way in which Malouf chronicles one man's descent from innocence into darkness.

[Tundra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just like the dunlin, a European water bird, that Jim has spotted as a solitary refugee in his beloved marshland in Queensland, Jim finds himself in the trenches of France far from home and alone. This is a beautiful novella that zooms in and out to glimpse the minute and the vastness of these two places which contrast greatly but are connected by earth and sea and the birds that navigate between them.
I picked this book up at a Lifeline bookfair and it’s been sitting on my shelf for some time. I’m glad I finally got around to reading another Malouf book. I read Harland’s Half Acre a number of years ago while driving across Australia and it’s still stuck with me as I’m sure this will too.

[Ole Pogie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything David Malouf writes is pure poetry. This story follows a young man named Jim Saddler and to a lesser degree a man named Ashley Crowther. Jim is a naturalist who goes to work for Ashley on his property to catalog birds until World War I breaks out and both men enlist. Primarily following Jim, Malouf takes the reader through some of the most horrific events that a man can face in combat. He does this by describing the psychological trauma that occurs without going into graphic detail of the fighting itself. It is a harrowing and heartbreaking account of the effects of war on the participants told in a magnificently poetic prose.

[Andrew Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fly Away Peter is a historical novel set before and during the First World War. Its story follows Jim Saddler, a young man with a love for the bird life of an estuary near his home. He meets Ashley Crowther, who has recently inherited the farm that includes the estuary. Ashley offers Jim a job as a warden, recording the birds in their "sanctuary." Jim also befriends the photographer Imogen Harcourt, who enjoys photographing the birds that inhabit the estuary.

Their idyllic life in Australia is interrupted by war in Europe. While on a short visit to Brisbane, Jim encounters excitement among young people eager to join the military and become part of the action. He resists at first, but ultimately relents, signs up, and is sent to France in 1916. There he is grouped with other Australians for the march to the front line.

Once there, Jim discovers the awfulness of the battlefield: rats, the stench of dead bodies, trenches full of water, and ever-present, overwhelming violence. One of his fellow infantrymen dares to look over the parapet and has his face blown off by a German sniper. While unloading ammunition from a truck, an artillery shell falls nearby. Jim is thrown through the air, only to see his friend Eric screaming, his legs blown off.

Ashley Crowther joins the military as an officer, and every once in a while their paths overlap. At the end, Jim is killed during one of the charges toward enemy lines. Ashley is injured in the same battle but manages to survive. Back in Australia, Imogen processes Jim's loss and questions how ordinary life continues after catastrophe.

The title comes from the nursery rhyme: "Two little dickie birds… Fly away Peter, fly away Paul…" It's one of those titles that seems opaque until you know the rhyme — and then it reframes the whole book: the "flying away" (and the hoped-for "coming back") maps straight onto Jim leaving for the war.

Reading David Malouf's stories, I always find that every word is essential to understanding the author's message. I fully agree with the observation that not a single sentence goes by without subtle foreshadowing or a clever metaphor. Four stars from me.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreakingly perfect.

[Ainsley · Rating 1 out of 5]

David Malouf is one of Australia's most talented authors, renowned for his sensual, descripive style. Unfortunately (for him and me), I happen to loathe this style of communication. I admire people who can maintain a sense of interest and wonder as Mr Malouf spends two or three pages describing how the character felt when walking up a hill. This book deals, at least partially, with war and communicates the confusion of a soldier in battle reasonably well. However, that's all it does. You are left wondering exactly what happened, aware that if you pore through the script that you might find out, but too bored to try.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love David Malouf's writing. I picked up this old (1982) novel at a used book store and didn't think it would be as good as his more recent stuff. Now I remember why I love his style--his writing is very poetic (he is a poet) and descriptive. He's one of those writers who capture the geography of the land as well as the mind of the narrator. He's received many awards, but I believe if he were British rather than Australian, he would have gotten a lot more. This novel of WWI Australia and Europe describes the world of Edwardian Australia (is that a term?). All the young men are so eager to fight in Europe--really for a world that is not theirs in a battle that makes little sense.

[Katrina · Rating 1 out of 5]

No wonder my kids don’t really like reading. Time and time again they are forced to read boring crap like this that has little to no appeal to a teenager.

I hated this book when I had to read it in Year 11 and I still hate I now that my kids have had to read it Year 11.

[Heather Feather · Rating 2 out of 5]

by the end of it i was so bored out of my mind i didn't care if they were gay or not. has one good chapter that just heightens how mid the rest of the novel is and leaves you wishing the rest of the book was that good.

[Lewis · Rating 1 out of 5]

fuck this shit

[Nhi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jim and Ashley should have ended up together. Quite boring and overrated.
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I just remembered that I got a B for the boring essay I had to write using this boring book, it will forever haunt me.

[Lesley Moseley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read years ago, and have never forgotten the ending...

[clarissa]

really educating.

[leonabetweenlines · Rating 1 out of 5]

Class reading… urgh

[Andrew Gay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crying for Jim. A beautiful book.

[Catalina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite being ultimately a war book, while I thought it was going to be a book about Australia and birds it definitely won me over . It is gorgeously written, poetry in fiction. It is one of those books that may deceive with its slimness, yet inside hides a huge, rich world, full of coulours, and sounds, and emotions that will take over your senses and overwhelm you.

[Kris McCracken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fly Away Peter by David Malouf breaks my Australian novel duck this year! Moreover, it’s a book that seems equal parts loathed and loved by thousands of Australian high school students due to its status as a set text on the Senior English curriculum in some states…

An exploration of identity that explores the boundaries of place, class and experience, Malouf uses a central motif of birdlife to survey a range of themes. Set in Queensland in the lead up to the First World War, the mystery of the migratory patterns of birds symbolically echoes the journey of the central character to the other side of the world to fight in a war he knows little about.

I liked the book. Even though it is a little heavy on the symbolism for my tastes, I can see why it makes ideal fodder for students of the form. The concepts of being, time, and meaning resonate through what is now a familiar tale of youth wasted at the altar of war, and the dualities of war/peace, life/death, innocence/experience, wealth/poverty, natural/manmade.

You can tell that Malouf has a fair history of poetry behind him, as the book is rich in poetic imagery. For that alone it’s worth a look. Consider that a recommendation!

[howsoonisnow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malouf provides a definitive split in this short read; the first half about the protagonist's life prior WWII, the second half about his life during WWII as an ANZAC foot soldier. The first half of the book was naive, saccharine and unconvincing. I simply cannot see a man paying another to be a bird watcher on his property, given the nationwide financial strife of 1939. The second half of the book was infinitely better, painting a rich, evocative, repulsive and unnerving portrait of life in the trenches. Overall, the prose is gorgeously lyrical throughout. My struggle though, was Malouf's clumsy and transparent attempts at juxtaposing (drawing parallels between) a life of peace, and a life of war. When an author's literary intent is obvious, his delivery feels heavy-footed. Wisdom needs to be imparted in the showing, not the telling; a narrative must be understated and subtle, if it is to avoid being preachy. Malouf's drawing of avian imagery from the prior half of his book, into the second amidst the horrors of war, was just painfully predictable (yes, I saw that coming from page one). Overall though, this book is a decent book. The prose is beautiful, and it imparts its message, albeit in a somewhat blustering way.

[Suhasini Srihari · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Fly Away Peter' is a distinctive novel wherein the author reveals to us, the readers, through life's small instances is there the continuity of life. Life is insignificant, therefore, its the individual's ability to create his or her own world. The individual can always escape from the immediate [through imagination] and travel to 'another world'. The theme of seeking permanence is also touched upon in the novel if given it a detailed and introspective reading. The poetic language used by Malouf makes the readers to feel [only if the reader is involved and is ready to place himself in the novel] whatever is described. Overall, 'Fly Away Peter' is an enjoyable read!

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written novella which uses bird imagery to capture the horrors of WW1. It is superb in describing the strange ambivalence that Australians have about getting involved in other people's wars on the other side of the world. I really enjoyed the main character's refections as he tried to understand why he was headed for a war in places he knew nothing about and didn't really understand why he needed to go. A very interesting comparison when read alongside a novel like Birdsong. David Malouf is one of Australia's best.

[David Sarkies · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rant about literature
21 July 2012

To be honest with you I thought this novel was little more than a load of existentialist rubbish. I have only read two of Malouf's novels, this one and the one about Ovid being exiled to the edge of the Roman Empire. It seems as if there is something in common with these two novels. Ovid is exiled from the centre to the fringe while here, in this novel, the main characters go from the fringe (being Queensland in Australia) to the centre (being the trenches in France during World War I). However I have no real intention of making any big deals about that because I really do not want to make a big deal about this book. Maybe it had something to do with my English teacher praising this novel as one of the greatest pieces of Australian literature ever written, and me just thinking that his tastes and my tastes differed so sharply that when he would begin praising a novel, I would begin hating it.

Look, I might be being a bit too harsh on Malouf, but after having to sit through A Street Car Named Desire, A Glass Menagerie, and Henrik Ibsen in year 12 English I had come to a point that I would pretty much hate anything that my English teacher loved, and this book was one of them (as was Gallipoli, which he was using as a contrast to this book since both of them involve the main characters getting slaughtered in the trenches of World War One). I do remember making a comment about how at the end of the book the main character, after being blown apart (I think) and going into a afterlife where he is forever digging into the ground in an attempt to return to Australia, was in hell, my teacher objected and asked 'how is he in hell? What did he do wrong?'. Well, if forever digging in the ground attempting to get to a place you will never reach is not hell, then what is? Seriously dude, there is a Greek myth in which some guy is forever pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again before it reached the top. That guy (I can't remember his name off hand) was in hell, and if he was in hell, so is Malouf's main character, even if Malouf never intended it to be that way.

I think the problem with modern literature is that people either write books purely for entertainment, or they write it in a vain attempt to win some wonderful prize (of have Oprah recommend the book on her show ala Deep End of the Ocean) and become some wonderful literary author that everybody wants to imitate. Sorry to burst your bubble, but so are all the other million of wanna be authors out there. I think Jim Butcher had it right when he said that writing was bloody hard work and if you want to succeed then you have to be bloody persistent. You either write because you love to write (as I do) or you go and do something real with your life. Seriously, writing is like acting, millions think that it is an easy way to make heaps of money but guess what, it isn't. Hey, at least writing gives you more transferable skills than acting (or playing football).

As for writing literature, you don't set out to do it, it just happens. I doubt Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Anton Chekhov, or even Shakespeare, ever set out to write a classic. No, they wrote because they either loved writing or had something that they wanted to say, and it just happened that history judged their works to be worthy of being called a classic. As far as I am concerned, your book or story is not a classic unless it survives a hundred years, and is still imprint, or, even better, manages to survive a dark age (such as The Odyssey). I once read about a writer who had finished writing a book and screamed out that he had just written a work of literature, and proceeded to throw it into the fire (writers can be a very strange lot, especially the good ones; Emily Dickinson locked herself in her room and had no contact whatsoever with the outside world).

As for writing a book with meaning, look, either say it (as Dostoyevsky did) or don't - don't try to cloud it with imagery when it is not necessary to do so. Don't get me wrong, I love allegory, but the reason that Jonathon Swift wrote in allegory was because if he didn't he was likely to be dragged out of his house by British soldiers, tied to a stake, and executed for sedition (okay, I am probably going overboard a bit, but you can probably understand what I am getting at). George Orwell wrote allegory, and his allegory worked really well, namely because it would have multiple layers of meaning. Animal Farm for instance appears to be about Soviet Russia when in reality it could really be about dear old England (similar in that 1984 could actually be about what it was like in 1948, the year the novel was publish). As for C.S. Lewis, he wanted to portray the Christian message to an audience (children) who probably could not grasp what is essentially an adult concept (not that children do not understand Bible stories, but I remember as a kid in Sunday School that I never understood the nature of Christ's sacrificial death). Finally I want to mention Tolkien. He wrote a fantasy novel, and a pretty damn good one as well. However, when people started carrying on about how it is an analogy of how industrialisation is destroying the world his response was 'what? I hate allegory. Lord of the Rings is not allegory, it is a fantasy novel.'

[Martin Ramsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book, too beautiful to give it less than a 5. It is a book that becomes more important with time as it looks at conservation and the relationship between contemporary Australia and the land. The land that desperately needs an approach like that of the Indigenous Australians who didn't seem to feel the need to change the nature of the landscape into something that's its not - a formal English garden. Ashley Crowther is the proud landowner who puts Jim, a local, in charge of the wildlife on his property. Proud of the wildlife as Jim points it out to his guests but the narrator says that, "in the place where the creatures were at home, they passed out of his possession as strangely as they had passed into it, and he might have been afraid then of his temerity in making a claim; they moved with their little lives, if they moved at all, so transiently across his lands - even when they were natives and spent their whole lives there - and knew nothing of Ashley Crowther" (32).