The Great World

The Great World is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century history of Australian life the novel focuses on the unlikely friendship of two men who meet as POWs of the Japanese during WWII: Digger Keen and Vic Curran. For both men war was supposed to be a testing ground of masculine and nationalist virtue. Instead it becomes an ordeal that lays bare the painful reality which lies behind a nation''s myth of itself. The rare serious novel that doesn''t condescend to its characters this book has a limpidity and an elliptical sense of time that save it from becoming a blockbuster-style epicdespite having some of that form''s easy pleasuresand render it poetic.The New Yorker