Volume 44, Number 6 · April 10, 1997
In Search of the Wild Boy
By Gabriele Annan
The Conversations at Curlow Creek
by David Malouf
Pantheon Books, 233 pp., $23.00
David Malouf's new novel is based on an event that occurred in New South Wales in 1827. An escaped Irish convict turned bushranger has been captured and condemned to die at dawn. Daniel Carney is the last of a gang. The rest have been killed or have disappeared. Three soldiers guard him-two nineteen-year-old Irish peasant boys called Garrety and Langhurst, and an older man called Kersey. A young officer is sent by the Governor to oversee the execution. This is Michael Adair, the central figure in the novel. He spends Carney's last night with him in the hut where he lies in chains. The 'Conversations' of the title are between these two; and also between Adair and the soldiers, whom he joins from time to time by their campfire. Not unnaturally, under the circumstances, they talk about death, crime, and punishment; and about their past lives-all of them grew up in Ireland. The young men joke and squabble and tell ghost stories. Garrety's story has one of the most disturbingly persuasive apparitions in it that I have ever come across: 'I felt,' he says '…like he [the ghost] was the one seeing me, rather than the other way round.'
Review, 2553 words
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