The Great World was published by Chatto & Windus in 1990. The novel won the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It follows two Australian soldiers — Digger Keen, a quiet, observant man from a small town on the Hawkesbury River, and Vic Curran, a charismatic, self-invented man who rises from poverty to wealth — from their meeting as prisoners of war on the Burma Railway in 1942-45 through their parallel lives in postwar Australia until the 1980s.
The war sections are harrowing: Malouf renders the experience of Japanese captivity — the starvation, the brutality, the disease, the forced labor, the constant proximity to death — with unflinching specificity. But the novel’s greater achievement is in showing how the war’s effects persist across decades: how trauma reshapes personality, how survival creates guilt, how the bonds forged in extremity connect people for life even when their peacetime worlds have nothing in common.
Digger remains in his small town, tending his mother’s store, living quietly, remembering everything. Vic builds a business empire, marries into society, accumulates wealth and power — but remains haunted by what he experienced and what he did to survive. Their friendship — maintained across the class divide that Australian society creates between them — is the novel’s emotional center.
The “great world” of the title is both the external world of history and commerce and the interior world of memory and consciousness. Malouf insists that both are equally real and equally important — that a man tending a store on the Hawkesbury River inhabits the great world as fully as a man commanding a corporate empire.
Collecting The Great World
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1990): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30