David Malouf - Child's Play

The main character of Child's Play, David Malouf's novella from 1982, is an assassin. He spends the hours from 8:30am until 7:00pm in a small office in an unnamed area of an unidentified city, studying his 'mark'. The man he is supposed to kill is a famed author, known internationally for his scintillating prose, known to the killer as a man of refined habits, heightened sensibilities, and a strong work ethic.

We are not told the name of the main character, though the story is written from a first person point of view. Indeed, a large number of characters either have no name, or are referred to by their name only a few times. This creates a tight, claustrophobic feel that allows for little in the way of sympathy or understanding.

The narrator has been uprooted from his life - we assume willingly - and made to live in a new city, in a new home, so that he can work and study. The office where he spends the majority of his time is clean and sparse, there is no talking. In the room where the five assassins that make up our narrator's group is filled with desks and filing cabinets and little else. Personal items, while not forbidden (by who?), are not extant in this tiny room. Elsewhere there is a room for sleeping, inhabited by someone, though the narrator suspects the person does not exist. This belief is reinforced by the arsenal of weapons, bombs and grenades scattered throughout the room - who would sleep there?

We learn, in what is almost a catalogue of details, the particulars of the narrator's work colleagues. They are not working on the same project as he, or if they are, he doesn't know it. We have Carla, a disconcerting woman. Enzo, the alpha male who struggles to show his masculine supremacy in an office routine that is dominated by silence. There are more, but they don't matter. Nor do Carla and Enzo.

Further details don't matter, but we are given them. The narrator has a father, with whom he shares a close but silent bond. 'It disturbs me that in this period of isolation I am forbidden to write to him.' In this short novella, totaling only 147 pages, a full ten page chapter is devoted to the narrator's father, sentences and paragraphs later, bear his touch. Why do we need to know this? The narrator makes it clear that his past is as irrelevant as his future - it is the job, the now, the present, that we should concern ourselves.

It is the chapter regarding the narrator's father that first poses a question in the reader's mind. Why are we reading about his father? Why do we care? The narrator explicitly refuses to detail his personality, his dreams, his previous life, and yet we are forced to suffer through a large section on his father? It is not an excuse that the writing is so sure, so elegant, so understated.

Yes, why are we reading these unnecessary details? Why do we go into an exhaustive recreation of the author's life - the one the narrator is contracted to kill? Pages and pages are spent on items that seem to have no relevance to the plot, or the character. Why is this? What is Malouf trying to achieve?

Explicitly, the narrator has no personality. He rejects personality. 'I am invisible', he states in an early passage. Again and again, the 'who' of the narrator is declared to be irrelevant. In effect, we have a protagonist for whom we cannot care. Because of the cold nature of the text, we are waiting for a revelation, or a secret, that will explain the ever-present mystery. But there is nothing. No revelation, no closure to our reading.

Everything is anonymous. People have no names, or they are fake. We are not given a reason as to why this famous author should die, but nor does the narrator know. He is doing his duty. What duty? To whom?

The most frustrating aspect of this novel is that it has no answers, it offers nothing in the way of closure or revelation, and yet it works double time to create a massive layer of mystery. Can we care about an unknown if the knowns are completely boring and dull? Should we stretch our imagination on a topic that inspires nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders?

To be as plain as can be: we are cheated. There are arguments that suggest that the reader has as much responsibility to work as the author, but I cannot expect that this excuse for obfuscation and sheer nothingness would hold up for this text. It is not my fault that a grander meaning is not there - it is the author's, for writing a piece that is, ultimately, about nothing at all. Should I put the entire novella down to an exercise in a text eschewing the need for meaning, resolution, character, plot, or insight? No, I cannot do that. I refuse to cheat others as I myself have been cheated. Child's Play is an unfair novel. It is all string, without a carrot in sight.

Malouf is a talented writer. Throughout, there are passages of great artistry. The narrator describing the daily routine of the master author is a section of particular note. 'Lighter in touch, more daring than anything he would have attempted in his great days or even ten years ago, it is a kind of scherzo in which his deepest themes reappear in travesty, as if, behind all their grandeur, their imperious graspings after the ideal, their noble solemnities, we were invited to see a group of children dressed up in their parents' clothes, the attic finery of a vanished era.' This is interesting writing, this is compelling imagery. But what do we have to show for all of this? Nothing at all. The narrator purports to be a cipher to a grand mystery, but he isn't. Clear the smoke and smash the mirrors - there isn't anything here.

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