SOURCE: "Strangers in a Strange Land," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 31, 1993, pp. 3, 8.

[An American critic and journalist, Eder received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1987. In the following review, he discusses Malouf's focus on alienation, colonialism, identity, and cultural conflict in Remembering Babylon.]

There is no fully satisfactory word to oppose to exile, that forced removal and dismayed regret for a land that will always be home. Contemporary Australian writers need such a word; it would denote the forcible remover, and the dismay of occupying a land that will always be alien.

"Invader" doesn't quite do it. What such gifted authors as Rodney Hall, Janette Turner Hospital and Peter Carey conjure up is more like the notion of crime in Greek tragedy than in our present-day world: a transgression against the gods committed without knowledge or intention, but which must be paid for anyway. Explicitly or...