The Great World by David Malouf is a great book. It's a saga of Australian life, built around the biographies of its two main protagonists, Digger and Vic, and their primary relationships - to family members mostly and to one another. Their lives are marked indelibly by their experiences as prisoners of the Japanese during World War II, a story of terrible hardships endured (and in their two cases survived) working as p.o.w.s in Thailand.
Malouf is expert at bringing out the physicality of things and, what lies just beneath the surface of human things - in a person's face, his skin, her bearing, a glance - the meaning for that person of the present encounter or of what they feel, or what they feel they are, for the other before them; how we can know in one another things that are never said; how one passage of a life can mark the whole of it beyond all possibility of forgetting or hope of comprehensive remedy.
I don't attempt to reproduce or exemplify the subtleties of the author's vision of how their wartime experience affected his two main characters. That is the core of the novel and can't be summarized. Here is a passage about what one young man says on the occasion of the death of another, older man:
He was speaking of poetry itself, of the hidden part it played in their lives... How it spoke up, not always in the plainest terms, since that wasn't always possible, but in precise ones just the same, for what is deeply felt and might otherwise go unrecorded: all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the very beginning. To find words for that; to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too - that, when it occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own.
Reporting the reaction of just one reader, I find these words applicable to the truths not only of poetry but also of the novel – and to the truth, more particularly, of this one. Of the books of Malouf's I've read to date, I think it is his finest, but I would warmly recommend, as well, the novella Fly Away Peter.