The stories engage us with their variety – why should a collection of stories exhibit ‘unity’? Soldiers, Pentecostals, statesmen, settlers, killers, writers, comfort girls, and children above all, rise from the page to mingle with our lives. Families lull us till anguish or terror breaks through. Wars cripple from afar, history takes fire in the street. The landscape shimmers in the inner eye, streaked sometimes with menace. Different styles, different settings and voices, attest to the author’s powers of sympathy, his sensibility preternaturally attuned to whispers of hidden being. It is as if Malouf’s sight remains sharpest in the dim underhouse of Brisbane clapboards, where life filters down through cracks in the floor. Call it the unconscious, our lost world; or call it, simply, the imagination, which Malouf, like writers from William Blake to Wallace Stevens, entrusts to redeem reality.

Take ‘Jacko’s Reach’, shortest of the lot, concerning a patch of scrub, ‘a pocket of the dark unmanageable’, a wild dreamscape where the outback meets progress. Before its conversion into a mall, everything hid there, the dross of civilisation, its illicit desires, its whelmed violence, murder, rape, theft. Under the pressure of Malouf’s imagination, a dismal tract of land becomes a parable of possession and dispossession, a zone of vital secrets, a microcosm of Australian history and, ultimately, of the human condition. The thing is ineluctable: ‘If there is one wild acre somewhere we will make that the place. If they take it away we will preserve it in our head. If there is no such place we will invent it. That’s the way we are.’

The insight is also reflexive: it applies to the writer’s enigmatic art. Take the title story, where a writer speaks. (We need neither presume nor ignore that the narrator may be some version of Malouf; we need only to recall that his memoir, 12 Edmondstone Street, is key to his work – a richer, more nuanced, meditation on multiculturalism in Australia than any academic text.) The writer, Colin, begins with his earliest memories in Brisbane, the day his mother’s Doberman, Maxie, dragged himself under the house to die. It proceeds, a palimpsest of events, memories, dreams, of stories overlapping stories in the sheer delight of recovery, to a violent and defining moment. ‘Dream Stuff’ ends with a dream:

And now, in a stretch of time where before and after had no meaning, in which none of the things had yet occurred that had so shaken his world and none of the people who most mattered to him had yet left his life or come into it, or they had and he was not yet aware of it – in that neither before or after, he was high up under the floorboards of the house, and though the light was almost gone, he knew that the pale stems in which he could see the endless pushing upwards of a liquid green light were the stems of gladioli, and that the great weight of darkness in his arms, which was still warm, was Maxie.

Thus the story, if not the dream within it, becomes the validation of the writer’s life. And who can doubt that Malouf knows himself when he describes Colin’s style as ‘the web of quiet incident and subtle shifts of power that were the usual stuff of his fiction’?

Malouf’s stories may find in dreams their identities, but the stories rarely close in on themselves; theirs is not an autistic craft. That is why the collection revives our sense of his range, his keen, roving, novelistic eye. Coming at a high point in his literary career – his name is on a brass plaque in Circular Quay, on slabs of glass in the Domain Gardens and the Museum of Sydney – the collection also betrays, retroactively, something like a flaw, an excess or lack in his work.

Flaw? A writer’s temperament is his fate. Reading Malouf, one thinks sometimes of the quip about Henry James, that he chews more than he can bite. This ruminative trait, a kind of writerly self-delight, is more likely to appear in Malouf’s novels than in his shorter fiction. Still, in the story entitled here ‘At Schindler’s’, some readers may wonder if they need, midway in the narrative, a third playmate to trigger the Oedipal furies of the protagonist. Indeed, the precision and amplitude of Malouf’ s prose, the density of specification and of psychological insight, do blur, sometimes, the clear, dramatic arc of his stories.

In Malouf, however, writerly opulence, a poet’s gift really, calls both author and reader to things of this world; like love, it binds us to creation. This sensuous and catholic attachment – call it also ‘the light that fills the world’ – attends a sweetness in the temper of his fiction, something deeper than gentleness, something nearer to reconciliation. Hence the felt spiritual force of his fiction, which in the masterly family narrative, ‘Great Day’, prompts the emotionally wounded Clem thus to address his progenitive clan: ‘Others were here, now they’re gone. But their heartbeats are still travelling out … Nothing is lost. Nothing ever gets lost.’

The Great Day refers to the birthday of the family’s patriarch, a statesman; it also happens to be an Australian national holiday, which Malouf transmutes into a moment of cosmic reconciliation. The moment reminds us that, here as elsewhere in Malouf’s oeuvre, the inmost workings of the psyche, the convolutions of domestic life, the antipodean heritage of Australia, the tectonic strains of geopolitics, and, as always, the inviolable mysteries of existence, often find imaginative forms adequate to our needs. Nearly as miraculous, readers actually enjoy reading David Malouf in every clime.