At the same time, memory is unreliable. It distorts time and space; it has a habit of playing tricks on us. In his memoir 12 Edmondstone Street (1985), Malouf casts himself as an ‘experience machine, that observes, thinks, smells, attends, touches’. He sets out to rebuild his childhood home in words, detail by detail, only to come up against a stubborn example of memory’s failure: a door he knows to have existed but which he cannot bring to mind, no matter how hard he tries. Part of memory’s peculiar power is the fact that it has this revisionist nature. Thinking is always entangled with feeling, and Malouf understands how the process of self-reflection can be pulled in different ways by the sensuality of memory, with its ability to colour our perception and reveal how the ‘world is full of odd, undisclosed connections’.

The title story of Every Move You Make ends with its heroine standing alone in the house she shared with her recently deceased lover, surrounded by physical reminders of his existence: clothes, dirty cups, bits of wire, a burnt match. Her decision to clear away these material traces of a man she never really understood is an attempt to free herself from the past. The ending is thus a ‘beginning’. Such decisiveness is, however, unrepresentative of the stories in Every Move You Make, which tend to eschew clear turning points in favour of an exploration of the strangely insinuating quality of memory and experience. This is implied in the epigraph from Pascal’s Pensées. Its subject is life’s brevity, and it reads in part: ‘I am stunned to find myself here rather than elsewhere, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, and now rather than then.’ The idea of destiny, which it goes on to evoke, is a kind of truism, and is too portentous a concept to describe stories of such subtlety, but an appreciation of the extent to which the direction of our lives is not necessarily a product of our will is a significant aspect of the book’s sometimes intense inwardness.

But Malouf is also a writer whose imagination is exercised by broad cultural forces that shape national identity. The characters in Every Move You Make are all products of their environment, regardless of whether they choose to accept or reject inherited expectations. The stories touch upon some familiar social themes: small-town conservatism and the desire to escape; the mutual incomprehension that often marks out social divisions; the importance of wartime experience in defining the national character. Malouf is, in particular, an astute observer of masculine behaviour. In what could be interpreted as a moment of self-referential irony, he even has one character, faced with yet another ‘average’ Australian bloke who is ‘uncomfortable with dramatics’, think to herself: ‘oh, here it comes, that again’.

Malouf’s talent is his ability to reveal the delicate sensitivities that are often contained within such apparently obvious ‘types’. He does not so much challenge the stereotype as gently prise it open to expose a consciousness more doubting and contemplative than is generally assumed. He has a great respect for the power of the word ‘mate’, which chimes in his fiction with all kinds of complex resonances. The two best stories in Every Move You Make convey an intricate understanding of the way men can be at once practical and defensive, and the way their emotional reticence manifests itself in curious ways.

The book’s opening story, ‘The Valley of the Lagoons’, is explicitly concerned with a male rite of initiation in the form of a hunting trip. Its narrator, Angus, recounts how as a teenager he began to grow apart from his childhood friend Braden McGowan. But the story’s central relationship is gradually revealed to be the awkward bond that develops between Angus and Braden’s older brother, Stuart, which is intimate in a needy but oddly deflected way that leaves open the possibility of misunderstanding.

‘The Valley of the Lagoons’ also explores the affection that Angus comes to have for the landscape of his youth, and the idea that it represents something unique. When the hunting party reaches the valley, a guide – it is implied he is of Aboriginal descent – instructs the boys about the land, teaching them skills of perception that are reminiscent of12 Edmonstone Street’s ‘experience machine’:

He showed us how to track, to read marks in the softly disturbed earth that told of the passage of some creature whose size and weight you could calculate – sometimes from observation, sometimes from a kind of visionary guesswork – by getting down close to the earth and attending, listening. The place was for him all coded messages; hints, clues, shining particulars that once scanned, and inwardly brooded upon, opened the way to another order of understanding and usefulness.

The idea that the world is a book of signs to be interpreted is a religious idea; here it implies a way of being in the world. The ‘order of understanding’ that Angus discovers is ultimately paradoxical: he comes to appreciate the extent to which he does not understand Stuart at all. Typically, this conclusion does not take the form of a clear revelation, but a kind of deepening of perception, which is conflated with his sense that, even after he has moved on, there can be ‘no final leaving’. The light he associates with his adolescent experience becomes ‘the light by which all moments of expectation and high feeling would in my mind for ever be touched’.

‘The Valley of the Lagoons’ would be the finest story in Every Move You Make were it not for ‘War Baby’, which concerns a quietly spoken young man named Charlie Dowd. Charlie lacks strong convictions and purpose, but his life is given a clear shape, literally by chance, when he is conscripted in the ballot to serve in Vietnam. ‘War Baby’ is, in part, an investigation of cultural ideas about manhood. Charlie inherits assumptions that he feels he must live up to. He is initially glad to have the chance to follow in his father’s footsteps and to become a soldier. His war service – the defining experience itself – is, however, absent from the narrative, which skips from the moment of departure to the moment of return. The real achievement of the story is the way it enters into Charlie’s consciousness, tracking his thoughts before and after his service in a subtly modulated fashion that resists any simple judgment about his experiences. On one level, the story shows how the inherited ideal is more complex and compromised than Charlie had believed. But, in its final pages, it also implies that there is something almost ineffable about the web of cause and effect that determined the direction of his life:

We lose whatever innocence we might have laid claim to the moment we are drawn into that tangle of action and inaction, of gesture and consequence, where the least motion on our part, even the drawing of a breath, may so change things that another, close by or far off, will be nudged just far enough out of the clear line of his life as to be permanently impaired.

The interesting thing about this sentence is the fact that, as it follows the rhythm of Charlie’s thoughts, the tense slips from the general to the specific, from the plural ‘we’ to the singular ‘his’. He attempts to distance the thought, only to have it come back to him. It is, once again, a curiously paradoxical revelation that the story teases out: Charlie’s loss of innocence involves the recognition that he was never really innocent to begin with.

It is notable that death is also a persistent presence in Every Move You Make. There are several funerals, and a number of stories gesture toward other-worldliness. There are even some evocations of angels. On this count, the third of the book’s three longest stories, ‘Mrs Porter and the Rock’, is the most heavily symbolic, its narrative straying into visionary territory. Its eponymous heroine, Dulcie Porter, is holidaying at Uluru with her insensitive Proust-reading son, Donald. She cannot see what is so special about the rock. She cannot understand why it is ‘sacred’, or why it should have any relevance to her. She is similarly unmoved by religion. The memory of being poked in the stomach by Dezzy McGee’s sandy toe at the age of eleven is more vivid and meaningful to her than a trip to church. She comes to feel that physical traces of existence have more solidity than existence itself, at one point imagining everyone – herself included – as ghosts, but being reassured by the fact that some coins she has found retain ‘their lovely solidity and weight’. Like Angus in ‘The Valley of the Lagoons’, Dulcie recognises that words are things, too. Names of places she has never visited have their own aura. Later, she writes down random words on scraps of paper as a way of making her thoughts tangible and hides them about her room as evidence of her stay.

The mood is one of reflection and acceptance. Dulcie comes to be reconciled to the shape of her life, one whose progress was determined by social expectations and her own lack of ambition. But ‘Mrs Porter and the Rock’ is also the most mystical of the stories in Every Move You Make, moving toward a moment of transcendence in which Dulcie is seemingly absorbed at the instant of death into a kind of mythical unconscious. It is an interesting story with a welcoming air of gentle comedy, but not an entirely successful one. Malouf’s mystical leanings are, I think, better absorbed in smaller, less indigestible doses.

More often, however, the stories in Every Move You Make – including some of the collection’s slighter inclusions, such as ‘Elsewhere’ and ‘Towards Midnight’ – are reminders that the short form is in some ways closer to poetry than to the baggy creature we call a ‘novel’. They are concentrated but capable of opening up to give an expansive sense of the interconnectedness of experience. Malouf’s power of evocation and the ‘grainy reality’ of his writing remain strong.