[训练]Unit3 Fly Away Peter(飞走吧,彼得)

[训练]Unit3 Fly Away Peter(飞走吧,彼得) Unit Three Fly Away Peter ? About the Author David Malouf was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1934. His father's family came to Australia in the 1880s from Lebanon and his mother's family from London just before World War I. He was educated at Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland, where he taught for two years after graduating. He left Australia aged twenty-four and lived in Britain from 1959-68 where he taught in London and Birkenhead. He returned to teach English at the University of Sydney, where he stayed until 1977. He now writes full-time and lives part of the year in Australia and part in southern Tuscany in Italy. Malouf has won numerous prizes for his work including the NSW Premier's Literary Award for An Imaginary Life in 1979, The Age Book of the Year Award in 1982 for Fly Away Peter, the Miles Franklin Award in 1991 and the 1991 Commonwealth Prize for fiction for The Great World. Remembering Babylon won the NSW Premier's Literary Award in 1993, and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. In June 1996, the novel was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, valued at 100,000 Irish punts. This is currently the world's largest literary award. Malouf's most recent novel, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, was nominated for the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award. ? About the Story I. The title of the book is from a children’s song: <> Two little funny birds sitting on the wall One named Peter The other named Paul Fly away Peter Fly away Paul Come back Peter Come back Paul II. Cultural Context Fly Away Peter was written in 1982. The novel is set in Queensland before World War I. We get an insight into two different cultural landscapes - Australia and Britain. Realistic insights of war are given through the horrors of European trenches. The wild beauty of the Australian landscape is shown to us through the migratory birds. III. The story Much of Malouf's fiction has been concerned with sorting out what he has called "the matter of Australia." Being an Australian writer, he says, is both a challenge and a gift. It gives him the freedom - but also the responsibility - to write about a place which is still in the making, still in need of definition. The tension between "cultured" Europe and "natural" Australia is a recurrent theme of his work. Other prominent themes are the ecological interdependence of nature and humanity, the blurred boundary between history and fiction, and the "other history"; the history of those insignificant events which constitute "the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet." In Fly Away Peter, the tension is between Europe, an old, already-made world, that is sick unto death, and Australia, a new world, idyllic, alive, and yet to be fully formed. The birds alluded to in the title are migratory, and they have a knowledge of both hemispheres. It is clear though that Jim (and through him, Malouf) sees Australia to be their home; and similarly, in the dreamlike account of Jim's death he imagines himself digging through the earth, all the way down to Australia, his haven, his heaven. Jim is a creature of innocence, just like the birds he loves. When he sees new species of birds in the early part of the novel, he names them. In this he is another Adam before the fall, a namer of animals. Australia is his Garden of Eden. The notion that inspires the whole novel is well expressed in Imogen Harcourt's reflections on Jim's death. She has a vision of all life, great and small, having enormous dignity and integrity. ? Analysis I. Genre This novel is written in the genre of social realism. It is written in a third person narrative voice. This objective viewpoint paints some very realistic insights of character and their complex relationships in the wake of war. II. Plot Summary Fly Away Peter is a short chronicle of important events in the lives of Jim Saddler, a plain Australian who has a passion for bird watching; Ashley Crowther, a Cambridge-educated landowner who employs Jim to give tours of the wildlife on his extensive property; and Imogen Harcourt, an eccentric English photographer whom Jim and Ashley befriend. Their idyllic life in Australia is disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in Europe. Jim, curious to see lands beyond his own, joins the forces as a private soldier and goes to war. Ashley goes as an officer. War in the ditches and trenches of Europe is hellish, and Jim, a gentle spirit, is duteous but he greatly wishes to return to his Eden, to the open hills, swamplands and lakes of Australia. Ashley's and Jim's paths cross occasionally, though only briefly, during the war. However, Ashley is there when Jim dies after receiving fatal wounds. He himself survives and returns to Australia. The novel finishes with Imogen Harcourt, having received news of Jim's death, visiting his father and reflecting on the great waste of life which the war has effected. III. Themes and Issues Nature and history Jim is a young Queenslander who has a strong sense of having found his place when he becomes warden of a bird sanctuary on Queensland. He is a silent young man at ease with observing the markings and migrations of birds. His life is marginal since world history does not pass through this region. It is a harmless, innocent life, rich in detailed experience of nature. The migratory birds remind him it is possible to span the immense distance that separates him from Europe. His friend Ashley Crowther, sophisticated, educated and returned from the heartlands of European culture in Cambridge and Germany. They are both very different. In 1914 war occurs. Both migrate to Europe to the trenches of World War One. The dying Jim imagines he is digging his way back home to Australia having now experienced Europe. This theme is reflected in the pervasive image of the migratory birds that have reconciled knowledge of two hemispheres. The novel clearly sets forth Ashley's preference for Australia as a place still to be made over Europe. War The grim reality of war and the ensuing suffering is a striking theme in this story. We are exposed to the harsh quality of life in the trenches in Europe as World War I breaks out. The latent savagery within man, the fear, terror, cold deprivations which war unleashes is told through the images given of Jim who suffers the brutality of life in the trenches. These images are continuously juxtaposed by strong bright images of a better life in another land. The story also shows how war not only brings about death and tragedy in its wake but it also shows the powerful capacity in humankind for endurance and tenacity. ? Language Points 1) The cattletrucks would keep on right across the century, and when there were no more young men to fill them they would be filled with the old, and with women and children. (Para. 2) Paraphrase: The war would go on endlessly, and when young men were all consumed/killed in war, the old, women and children would have to go to the front of the war and be consumed by it. 2) They had fallen, he and his contemporaries, into a dark pocket of time from which there was no escape. (Para. 2) Paraphrase: The young soldiers, he and his contemporaries, had been involved into the endless war and become hopeless because they could see no way out. 3) Jim saw that he had been Living, till he came here, in a state of dangerous innocence. The world when you looked from both sides was quite other than a placid, slow-moving dream, without change of climate or color and with time and place for all. He had been blind. (Para.3) Paraphrase: Jim became aware that before he had been involved in the war he was just too socially naïve, which put him in danger in the realistic world. Now experienced the stark realities of the ruthless world, he came to know it was utterly different from his dream world which should be slow-paced and peaceful, and where the climate, color, time and place remained unchanged. Until now he realized that he knew nothing about the realistic world. 4) It wasn’t that violence had no part in what he had known back there, but he had believed it to be extraordinary.(Para 4) Paraphrase: It’s not to say that he had never experienced violence when he was back in homeland before the war, but at that time, he had thought that violence was only exceptional.