The Pages

The Sunday Age

Sunday July 13, 2008

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Murray Bail's sly wit and sexually charged ideas give his works their spark. Chris Wallace-Crabbe admires the elegant jokes in Bail's new novel.

THE PAGES

Murray Bail

Text, hardcover, 208pp, $34.95

We are always going to be surprised by new fiction from Murray Bail. Not only is he clever, but his originality is always marked by a modernist's conceptual ambition. His novels jink and jape; they are canny and cluey.

The prize-winning Eucalyptus sounded utterly Australian: how much further can you go than that title, after all? Yet it felt European in its generic construction and cunningly cool tone. Historically, it was an important work. According to critic Delys Bird, "it brings together and alludes to many of the preoccupations and techniques which have shaped Australian fiction since the 1970s".

There is another side to all this. As E.M.Forster sighed long ago, "Oh dear, yes. The novel tells a story." When we read Bail, we are not so much driven by the engine of his narrative as diverted by juxtapositions and moments of syncopation. Or rather, the story is a string on which are threaded the bright beads of his insights.

This is true of his new novel, cunningly named The Pages. In this outback story we find prose as jaggedly arrayed as this: "There was an unexpected garden - the greenery, roses - and to the side a flagpole, machinery, shearers' quarters, the corrugated tank on stilts - representing labour, self-reliance - which threw shadows angular and out of kilter across the gravel, implying the presence, surely, of patterns and complexities to be traversed."

This is not the most comforting prose. It calls for attention, being as angular as the shadows it describes. On the one hand, it rapidly evokes a traditional homestead; on the other, we have authorial interventions and conclusions, qualified by "surely", a word which means that the speaker isn't so sure, after all. This crammed sentence could also be seen as a key to the whole novel. Here is the house to which two women have travelled from the city. One of these is the psychiatrist, Sophie, whose "amours" give her trouble. Yes, it is also a Sydney-or-the-bush novel.

And the narrator's tone is shifting, even cubist, trying to take on board the thought-voices of the two city women and those of the homestead family, including Wesley Antill, its bush philosopher, whose eponymous pages Erica has come to examine: loose sheets scattered about in the woolshed. His past is interwoven here with the present, in which Erica gradually comes to terms with this "place of unimaginable stillness".

Quaintly enough, Bail likes to make a play with surnames, among his other sleights of language. As well as the well-named local composer John Antill, he trails before us Hazlehurst, Mannix, Kentridge, Perloff and Steig, each of them hinting at another cultural avenue, another frame of reference.

There is an odd little chapter in which the speaker - we can only take him to be the evasive narrator - delivers an attack on the psychoanalytic movement. Its disconcerting high point is the sentence, "Beware of women who are or have been in analysis, even if only for a year or two". Cop that! Or, rather, ask where it comes from and whether it gets undercut by the story.

Bail's writing is not only witty and analytical. It is also sexually charged, from a distinctly male point of view. Erica's introduction includes her "lovely rounded body", while we are soon given her friend Sophie's body, "exaggeratedly soft and pale". This is no accident, since the author interweaves a romance narrative closely with his philosophical themes.

A key sentence at the heart of the novel stands back and invokes these twin subjects: "The greatest of the great philosophers followed the solitary life, a life of relative simplicity, living alone, in that sense a hard life, just the candle on the table, whereas the founder of psychoanalysis and his disciples and rivals enjoyed married lives, children and gardens ..."

This is also designed to keep us guessing about the destiny of Erica and the philosopher's brother, Roger.

This is a book handling modern cultures, a lively romance, and also, like Bail's previous novels, a jigsaw of reflections on Australia.

On facing pages early on we get "Sydney of course is one of the nicest places in Australia" and then, "At the very word 'philosophy' people in Sydney run away in droves, reach for the revolver; they look down at their shoes, they smile indulgently, they go blank". There is much about his comic temper that reminds me of Swift or Voltaire.

Bail's first novel, Homesickness, was as funny as a barrel of monkeys, full of fantastic inventions that portrayed the modern world as a theme park. Now, 28 years later, his tone is more sober but the bright, edgy wit is still in play, as is his interest in how we acquire knowledge. Perhaps his central tenet is one left behind by Wesley for the book's last chapter: "There is nothing ordinary about anything." -- Chris Wallace-Crabbe, poet, essayist, is professor emeritus at the Australia Centre, University of Melbourne.