SOURCE: "Dark Terror," in Hungry Mind Review, No. 28, Winter, 1993–94, pp. 54-5.

[In the review below, Garner favorably assesses Remembering Babylon, stating that this is "Malouf's best book" to date.]

The Australian writer David Malouf's new novel is a compact import—at a lean two hundred pages, it's practically a novella—but it arrives with a mighty rumble behind it. In the U.K. Remembering Babylon is an odds-on bet to grab the Booker Prize, and elsewhere in Europe the book has been heralded as Malouf's long-awaited breakthrough. The hype isn't mere woodsmoke: Remembering Babylon, a shrewd meditation on Australia's racial and cultural divides, has the intellectual heft and moral resonance of novels three times its length. It's Malouf's best book, and it's a beauty.

Remembering Babylon's modest size wouldn't be worth remarking if Malouf's last novel, The Great World (1990), hadn't spread itself across such a sprawling canvas...