Every Move You Make by David Malouf
(Chatto & Windus, £14.99)
An angel of death hovers over David Malouf’s new collection of short stories, Every Move You Make. Perhaps it is inevitable: Malouf has just turned 73, and the horizon where the known world joins the unknown is getting closer. “Death is the big event,” he said in a recent interview. “You’d be pretty foolish to ignore it.” In these beautiful stories, death sometimes arrives abruptly in suburban lives and draws the living towards it. But sometimes it seems not so much an end, or even a translation, as an encounter with the magical, bright mystery that complements and makes sense of life.
In “Mrs Porter and the Rock,” Dulcie Porter is fragmenting; dementia is breaking up her mind. Death, which she has managed to forget since her childhood, is filling up the spaces, leaving her son baffled and furious. Yet Mrs Porter takes her transformation lightly, chuckling as she goes. The unnamed woman in “Towards Midnight,” the best of the stories in this book, welcomes the angelic swimmer in the pool of her Tuscan villa, too. She feels his arrival in the silvery midnight as a vibration of wings, and sees “streamers of light at his shoulders” as he beats up and down. Although he is probably a migrant worker who has found his way in, she knows he is a herald of her own departure, the moment when she will, with relief, “pass the weight of her body… to some other agency.”
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