Fly Away Peter

THE two quotations chosen by David Malouf to preface Fly Away Peter provide clues to understanding the connections between the novella's literal and metaphoric landscapes.
The first, from Chesterton, is about the mystery of human duality.

“Man” can choose to fly higher than the angels or sink lower than any beast.

Malouf's imaginary landscape provides a series of binaries to symbolise the best and worst in human nature: the airy Queensland bird sanctuary is bathed in metaphorical sunshine, and the blasted European battlefield is inhabited by those “familiars of death”, the rats, and the stinking mud glitters darkly “under the dangerous moon”.

At first, because Malouf’s protagonist, the archetypal Anzac Jim Saddler, is sheltered in his Australian Eden, he exists in a sunny imaginary landscape.
His understanding of his own nature is conveyed in an extended metaphor of seeing; dazzled by sunlight, Jim's vision is limited by his narrow experience, though he has the “map in his head'' of a wider world. He is complaisant among the abundant birdlife, in “the flat world of individual grassblades, seen so close up that they blurred''.
Under the illusion that he is not “infected'', he believes he can keep his father's savagery and cowardice “at arm's length''.
Ironically, his journey to the Western Front and “into the dark side of his head'' leads Jim to enlightenment.
He discovers that he is, after all, infected by the same ancestral savagery and cowardice he eventually sees everywhere.
He falls into “a dark pit of time'' and now sees that his childhood home was no unspoiled paradise after all, thereby losing his “dangerous innocence''.
His vision is darkened.

Following this, “(t)he earth was one vast rag and bone shop'' reflecting Jim's nihilism and despair, but the landscape is ultimately also the source of Jim's spiritual healing.

The sight of an old man digging a garden in the middle of the battlefield ``lifted his spirits''.
The natural world's...