2nd
odd humour of the man
‘The big trouble with you, mate,’ Doug would tell him, ‘is that you know too much fer your own good. All it does is make ya mournful. Now I ask you, what’s the use a’ that?’
‘I’m not mournful,’ Mac would insist.
‘A’ course you are. You’re about the most mournfullest bloke I ever laid eyes on. Honest, Mac, you oughta take a dekko at yerself. I tell ya, mate, you look as if the world ended last Mondee and you just got news of it.’
These sallies were pure affection. They took in a side of Mac that in Doug’s opinion was excessive. He needed to be jollied out of it. It was his ratbag side, the side of all those failed, unforgotten utopias that blokes like Mac, dyed-in-the-wool idealists, would give their lives for—and other people’s lives as well if they could get them, all in the name of some future that most fellers didn’t want and couldn’t use and weren’t fit for, and couldn’t be made fit for either, unless you wrenched them this way and that till there was nothing left that was human in them.
Mac defended himself, lost his temper, became just the sort of angelic storm-trooper Doug accused him of being, then laughed and put on his self-deprecating, comic-suffering look, but refused to admit defeat.
Doug’s cynicism beat him every time, but somehow, when it was over, he was not beaten. He was self-possessed, Mac, but he was also passionate and contradictory too. Only when he was leaning forward into the music and utterly absorbed by it were the different sides of him resolved. What you saw then—what Digger saw—was the absolute purity of him.
‘I’ll never be like that,’ Digger thought. ‘Not in a million years.’
Then Mac would catch him looking and wink, and what you saw then was the odd humour of the man.’
excerpt from David Malouf’s “The Great World”, p117.
I loved this passage and then hated it for what it set the reader up for. Damn good book.
Also, thank you Tragos. He saw me drool over this novel in a bookshop and saw me stoically decide i had no time for such things, but he always seems to know what i need. So when i got home i saw it on my desk, he’d checked it out for me at the library on the way home from work.
