David Malouf - Themes and Subject Matter

Themes and Subject Matter

Malouf's writing is characterised by a heightened sense of spatial relations, from the physical environments into which he takes his readers—whether within or outside built spaces, or in a natural landscape. He has likened each of his succession of novels to the discovery and exploration of a new room in a house, rather than part of an overarching development. "At a certain point, you begin to see what the connections are between things, and you begin to know what space it is you are exploring." From his first book Johnno, his themes have focused on "male identity and soul-searching". He said that much of the male writing that preceded him "was about the world of action. I don't think that was ever an accurate description of men's lives". He believes that it was Patrick White who turned this around in Australian writing—that White's writing was the kind "that goes behind inarticulacy and or unwillingness to speak, writing that gives the language of feeling to people who don't have it themselves".

He said that "I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives". However, after nearly four decades of writing, he has concluded that in older writers there's sometimes "a fading of the intensity of the imagination, and ... of the interest in the tiny details of life and behaviour—you see getting a bit impatient with that."