The Outback Down Under

"HE HAD SOME obscure sense that his life was meant to go crosswise and be led in defiance of nature rather than in the easy expression of it." So speaks I rank Harland, an intense young painter growing up in Australia in David Maloul's latest novel. Harland's Hall Acre. The book spans the pre Depression to post World War II ears and details I rank's life and struggle to succeed.

His family, once rich in land, has recklessly lost all their wealth and I rank's ambition is to regain it--first physically, by selling his paintings and second spiritually, by recapturing on canvas the images of the lost land. In attempting to fulfill his ambition, however, he believes he must go against his own nature. His ambition to regain land goes beyond wishing to succeed to an obsession with punishing himself.

I rank works relentlessly. He refuses to take the easy way out by supporting his father at home and prefers to contradict his naturally affectionate nature and become a drifting loner. He defies and hides his familial devotion and sacrifices almost all human comforts for his work. Yet he is still tied to his family by his ambition to restore it to its former glory. He is bound to support and maintain his father and brothers by a deep sense of loyalty and pride, but he shuns any personal contacts.

I rank, as he loses his community and family ties, sinking deeper into an almost unbroken isolation, also loses sight of any sort of purpose or joy in living--besides slapping down paint. An acquaintance of his says of him.

"He would live and work for the rest of his life arm in a state of almost complete Isolation: connected to the city across the Hay only by the glow its lights made over the treetops on starle nights and the passage of suburban board-riders past his pertly of scrub, and In the disruptive decade or had broken into by the piles of newspaper recollected each fortnight from the local store, on the paddled thick house paint."

By the end of the book Frank's second sense of regaining his family's lost estate (the recapturing of it on canvas) is the most important and lasting achievement, yet one feels no sense of triumph or joy. The book's title does not refer to actual land, but rather to the vast number of paintings that Frank has produced of his family's lost estate, discovered and displayed after his death. He has achieved great acclaim as a painter, but at what cost? He says.

"Forgive me. I have not explained things well, not the way I would've wanted. The words in my head won't do it, only the paintings could tell the whole of it and they're in a language you don't read. What I leave you, my dear brothers and you too father if you survive me is only the smallest part of what I wanted to give you out of the great love I had for you."

DESPIII FRANK'S loneliness. Harland's Half Acre is not a book filled with gloomy despair. Instead it is filled with endless details of Australian life--every thing and everyone Frank sees.

Although franks like is for the most part develop of deep personal contuets, occasionally his affectionate nature breaks through and one glimpses what could have been-in the sharing of broad pudding with his father, and the even more lasting and important friendship with "Phil," who ironically who becomes I rank's lawyer and advisor. Even this friendship is corrupted into a business partnership. Much of the story comes through Phil's narration. through Phil the reader receives a more practical perspective of I rank, as well as relief from the explosively detailed prose surrounding I rank's narration.

Maloul writes well, even when he overwhelms one with his vivid word pictures. Fortunately Phil's down to-earth narration rescues the reader and allows for more relaxed and absorptive reading. Maloul's style parallels the theme of the book, for as the sensitive Frank is bombarded with countless images, so too is the reader, until relieved by Phil's narration.

Frank, however, is allowed no such relief, and this, combined with his driving ambition to succeed and to cross his own nature, forces him farther and farther from civilization and from sanity. As Frank loses touch with reality one is made actuely aware of the danger of aintense ambition I rank can respond to his own torment only by withdrawing from the civilized world. Harland's Half Acre explores this conflict, showing the complexity as well as relevancy of it in today's world.