On narrow paths among the rhododendrons, pilgrims approach to the sound of bells. Then, one cool morning, India, valley on valley falling among threads of smoky water, long sights of relief after the desert places, and a ridge of mist-shrouded deodars. Weeks of swaying across a landscape of blinding light, with nothing to break the horizon but an occasional outcrop or the bristling gun barrels of a band of brigands. She remembers (in the polished words of the narrator), In 1917, as a ten-year-old child, she fled war and the retribution of the Bolsheviks, from St Petersburg to the border of Poland. Mrs Judge is the daughter of a Grand Duke, a cousin of the Romanov children murdered in Ekaterinburg. Mrs Judge turns out to be Vale’s adopted daughter, and her own story is superb, very nearly fabulous – something like the extraordinary life her adoptive mother pretended to have lived. Later her parents were saltimbanques in a travelling circus, Hungarian Jews… (p. …she had let journalists tell people whatever they wanted to hear to dream up previous lives for her that were appropriate to Odabella or Semiramis… So her father was said to be a nephew of Napoleon, who had settled in New South Wales in the Fifties and married a local heiress. There he runs into an unremarkable outback woman, Mrs Judge, who claims an intimate knowledge of his favourite subject. In ‘A Traveller’s Tale’, an Arts Council lecturer and specialist in the famous Australian-born Opera singer and diva, Alicia Vale, travels to a small hinterland town between Coffs Harbour and Brisbane. It is no surprise, then, that Malouf’s stories are fascinated, not only with the world of dreams, but the way dreams persist across time and space. A thing that could be believed in or not. Kamo-no-Chomei (1155–1216) wrote in his Mumyō-sho (Treatise Without a Name), that yūgen occurs, ‘when an unseen world hovers in the atmosphere’.Īs the son of an English-Jewish mother and Lebanese-Christian father, it is easy to imagine the young Malouf hearing stories of the world that existed beyond Brisbane – the world of his elusive heritage, but which seemed to have no real bearing on life as lived daily. Arthur Waley, translating fifteenth century playwright and pioneer of Noh, Zeami Motokiyo, said that wandering in a great forest without thought of return is a path to yūgen, as is standing on a shore and gazing after a fishing boat that disappears behind an island, or seeing wild geese disappearing into white clouds. In medieval Japanese art and letters, this quality was known as yūgen (幽玄),which might be translated as ‘shadow-filled’ or ‘beyond words’ or ‘that which resists being clearly seen’. The one you can touch with your hands, and the one that is dreamed – discoverable by language, always on the verge of disappearing. There are always two landscapes in a Malouf story.

The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland