In his Novella, Fly away Peter, Malouf has created a solid, definitive passage that focuses on the journey from innocence to experience of the worst kind through his use of flashbacks in contrast to the present, then future predictions, and dramatic graphic descriptions though language techniques. The author presents Jims life of innocence and compares it to the ‘nightmare’ he now lives in, then unusually - predicts what the future may hold suggesting that the ‘cattle trucks would keep on right across the century’. This anti- war passage conveys a strong message against war, the ‘immense and murderous machine’ which effects a response in the reader such that we sympathise or share the same views as the author.
A technique Malouf employs in the extract is the use of evocative and graphic descriptions of war that create a constant sense of fear within both the reader and the characters in the novella. Malouf carefully writes to include various senses, describing the smell of mud ‘which stank of what it had already swallowed, corpses, the boated carcasses of mules’ then feeling the ‘scorching heat’ and looking on the ‘sea of mud’. Malouf had skilfully used the various senses for intense effect where the reader can relate to these feelings and we consequently see the war in a negative light, the way the author intended. Another technique Malouf uses it personifying the war, where Jim predicts the war will ‘would go on growing out from here until the whole earth was involved’. This is used for dramatic effect where the war is being portrayed as growing, but what Jim means is spreading out to other countries. This technique is again used for dramatic effect so the reader can relate to something growing and compare it to the war spreading.
Another technique is the use of flashbacks and references to the past. These two combine to form this extract. The novella states that ‘Jim had been living, till he came here, in a state of dangerous innocence’ then reflects back to the sanctuary, commenting ‘he had been blind’ referring to the fact that he had little experience in his former life and had been somewhat sheltered and protected. Jim hadn’t been exposed to violence before in his life at this level. ‘It was not that violence had no part in what he had known back there but he had believed it to be extraordinary’. Jim takes on a very depressing attitude for a young person. He had a ‘fearful vision’ that it would ‘go on forever’, then ‘keep on right across the century when there were no more young men to fill them they would be filled with the old, and with women and children’ a somewhat dreadful prediction. This really