Never a Dull Moment

David Malouf's prose has been called many things in the three decades since his first novel, Johnno, was published: poetic, prize-winning and pearl-like in its polish. But rarely sexy. In work such as Remembering Babylon and Dream Stuff, as much action seems to take place inside the mind as in the body. Which makes the love scene in the title story of his latest collection of short fiction, Every Move You Make (Chatto & Windus; 244 pages), something of a breakthrough. Here the writerly restraint—as book editor Jo conjoins with the ultimately unknowable Sydney house-builder Mitchell Maze—should be studied by every budding Mills & Boon author: "For a moment he entirely yielded, and she felt, in his sudden cry, and in the completeness afterwards with which he sank into her arms, that she had been allowed into a place that in every other circumstance he kept guarded, closed off."

Even in the throes of passion, Malouf's characters have a tendency to sublimate their feelings. Like Jo, who "wanted a love that would be overwhelming, that would make a wind-blown leaf of her, a runaway wheel," the acclaimed Australian writer, now 72, prefers to explore more spiritual intimacies. This is the theme of his seven new short stories, each in its own way a memento mori. In War Baby, an abandoned son wears his late father's R.A.A.F. greatcoat in preparation for fighting in Vietnam; in Elsewhere, a Blue Mountains father grieves for his lost daughter by reading poetry dedicated to her at her Sydney wake; a composer watches in wonder as his wife sings his music to life in The Domestic Cantata. These are consummations of the soul.

For readers who like their short stories with a Roald Dahl-ish twist, Every Move You Make could be a form of Chinese water torture. As the title character of Mrs Porter and the Rock, about a widowed suburbanite dragged by her son to Uluru, complains: "Nothing had happened." But those who relax into Malouf's dreamy prose, the rewards are pleasurable and profound. In The Valley of Lagoons, we enter the stillness of the Gulf country through the consciousness of a 16-year-old boy to discover "an interweaving of close but distant voices so dense that they become one." The sensual motion of a swimmer is watched so intensely by a woman undergoing chemotherapy in Towards Midnight that the reader is drawn into "the fleshy roots of her iris." Each story carries its own quiet brush with mortality.

So much so that the collection could have been subtitled Seven Short Stories to Read Before You Die. But Malouf's writing is too subtle for that. With his characters carrying the flickering flame of belief, these stories are beautifully crafted articles of faith. Comparing man's plight to that of the indestructible cockroach, Dulcie Porter muses: "The cockie statistics were impressive, but when it came to survival you couldn't beat people, that was her view." Such robust inner lives are alone worth celebrating in these miraculous short stories.