They are terrorists. Every day he and five other young people go to their ‘office’, which is also ‘library, information bank and arsenal’. There they work from half-past eight in the morning till seven at night, six days a week, studying the life and habits of their prospective victims. They keep their distance from one another, for reasons of psychological as well as physical security, employ code names, go out dancing occasionally, but only for appearance’s sake, and in general lead lives of totally ascetic dedication – not like a monk, the narrator claims, but rather like an athlete preparing for his most important event.

Virtually nothing occurs in Child’s Play until its bloody climax, which is told to us only retrospectively. The book is a meditation, filled with dreams and reflections, a philosophical disquisition even, the thrust of which is not easy to grasp. Malouf’s assassin is in almost every respect a perfectly normal young man who goes out of his way to repudiate intelligently all the obvious or predictable reasons why he should have chosen such a ‘vocation’. But if we are not given any pop psychology explanations we are not given any others either. Perhaps that is Malouf s point, that the young man is merely normal, but if so it is less than satisfying: after all, most people don’t become assassin.

If the theme of the novel is imagination or the lack of it (the word itself, incidentally, crops up repeatedly), the actual prose on the other hand is the opposite – aloof, objective, classicist, though not without an occasional rhetorical flourish, and inclined to move towards abstraction. Malouf is scarcely interested in the individual psychology of his protagonist. He does not reveal anything of the cause he represents or explain the purpose of his planned murder of a man whom he obviously reveres. The psychology is rather a generalised one, that of the terrorist, and the prose is appropriately lacking in specificity or detail. The best thing in the book is unquestionably a long Nabokovian chapter in which Malouf manages the impressive feat of convincing us of the greatness of his victim figure, a distinguished novelist of liberal persuasion (rather like an Italian Thomas Mann) and giving us some idea of the nature of that greatness while scarcely citing a single word he has written.

The two shorter stories in the volume also deal with disturbed or deranged states of mind. ‘Eustace’ concerns a nocturnal intruder into a dormitory full of young girls. One of them comes upon the man but decides to adopt him instead of raising the alarm. She finds the exercise of her imagination on someone real much more satisfying than the essays she is compelled to write: ‘Even when they wrote a composition to use their imagination the lines were strictly drawn. Miss Wilson wrote the opening paragraph on the blackboard. It was an old house on Dartmoor, in England, deep in fog ...’ When the other girls become aware of his repeated visits, they remain silent and there is a complicity of resistance to authority among them, as there had previously been for the hamster they had concealed and after whom the intruder is named.

What finally happens to the girl and her eventual abductor is left deliberately unclear. Phrases such as ‘the awful facts’ and ‘ultimate harm’ are employed, but their significance is nebulous and the girl Jane certainly returns to school. Characteristically, Malouf works by suggestion and intimation rather than direct statement.

The shortest of the three pieces, ‘The Prowler’, is rather different, structured more like a Peter Carey story. Malouf takes a single premise – a suburban prowler who terrorises women at night – and builds steadily on it to the point where the prowler (or prowlers) has become a symbolic index of cosmic disorder. Malouf hasn’t quite Carey’s skill, though, in compelling assent to a series of increasingly bizarre occurrences, ‘a passionate fantasy’ as he calls it, and the time shifts in the narrative are rather maladroit; perhaps dated diary entries might have served the purpose better. The story ends improbably with the detective in charge of catching the prowler speaking to himself: ‘Even these notes are a dead giveaway. I know too much. I have become a primary suspect. ‘Confess! Confess!’

In all three of these stories, Malouf seems fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between assassin or prowler and victim, but he is never fully convincing on this. There seems something factitious, for instance, about the studied synchronisation of the movements of the narrator in Child’s Play and those of his prospective victim four hundred kilometres away.

Malouf speaks in that novel of ‘the whole horror of a generation’s induction into the realities of war’. In Fly Away Peter, this is the phenomenon he sets himself to describe. World War I has attracted the attention of several Australian artists recently, such as Roger McDonald in 1915 and Peter Weir in Gallipoli. Like them, Malouf is unable to match the sheer verisimilitude and authenticity of the great participant accounts of the experience of the war: Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, Mann’s Flesh in Armour, and Boyd’s When Blackbirds Sing – but of the three he probably comes closest.

Fly Away Peter is the story of a young Queenslander, Jim Saddler, who works on a low-lying property recording and annotating the bird life of the area and making of it a kind of sanctuary for wild life. With him is an ageing English woman Imogen Harcourt who shares his passion for the freedom and beauty of the birds and photographs them to contribute to his records. This idyllic life is disrupted by the advent of World War I. Eventually, rather reluctantly as if he senses its foolishness, Jim enlists in the army and the longest, middle section of this short novel describes the horrors of his experience in France, with the farm scenes acting as a kind of frame at opening and close.

All the familiar iconography of the Great War is here – the mud, the poison gas, the oversized rats, the maimed and screaming horses, the incessant din of the shelling – but though they are familiar Malouf brings them graphically to life with sharply observed detail. As in Siegfried Sassoon’s George Sherston Memoirs, there is a careful structure of opposed images for peace and war – flight and loftiness as against the clogging mud and faeces of the trenches, the aircraft as soaring bird and arbiter of death, the rats, ‘familiars of death creatures of the underworlds, as birds were of life and air’.

Throughout the horrors of the fighting, the memory of the sanctuary in Queensland and even the presence of the birds on the battlefield act as a salutary kind of norm for Jim, a reminder of other possibilities and of the fact that the earth is not merely as it seems to him at the moment, ‘one vast rag and bone shop’. The author tells us, ‘Even here, in the thick of the fighting, there were birds. The need to record their presence imposed itself on him as a kind of duty.’

Eventually, of course, Jim is killed but, as often in Malouf’s work, death is not so much an act of extinction as of release. Death is merely another oneiric experience in which he meets Ashly Crowther, the owner of the land he had encouraged Jim to tum into a sanctuary, and Clancy Parkett, his closest mate, who had been blown to smithereens over a year ago. The novel ends ambiguously with Imogen back in Australia gazing on a surfer, an image of freedom in the midst of her mourning.