SOURCE: "Artful," in Quadrant, Vol. XXXVIII, Nos. 1-2, January-February, 1994, pp. 115-17.

[Blanche is a New South Wales novelist. In the excerpt below, she faults Malouf's focus on characterization rather than theme in Remembering Babylon.]

Remembering Babylon, David Malouf's latest novel, is beautifully written, as indeed is everything that Malouf produces. It is a story about a small Queensland settlement in the mid-1800s and how the arrival of a mancreature from out of the bush affects it.

… and its flamelike flickering, was not even, maybe, human. The stick-like legs, all knobbed at the joints, suggested a wounded waterbird, a brolga, or a human that in the manner of the tales they told one another, all spells and curses, had been changed into a bird, but only halfway, and now, neither one thing nor the other, was hopping and flapping towards them out of a world over there, beyond...