The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail

Murray Bail is one of the most boldly innovative and intellectually challenging of contemporary writers. He is widely appreciated in his homeland, Australia. Although a casual reading of Bail's work affords shocks, laughter and stimulation aplenty, it usually raises of a host of questions that nag and tantalize readers for years to come. This is a legacy of his unambiguous declaration in favour of the novel of ideas and, above all, of bold invention and risk taking. Also his individual works can seem at first sight unrelated: a novel that recounts the world-wide peregrinations of tourists through museums, real and imaged (Homesickness); its sequel in a parodic novel of education that attacks Australian parochialism (Holden's Performance); followed by what Michael Ondaatje has called 'one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature' (Eucalyptus), and most recently the depiction of a failed attempt to live the life of an original thinker, which explores the rival interpretative claims of philosophy and psychology (The Pages). This first critical study of Murray Bail maps out the coordinates, and sheds invaluable light on, the intellectual labyrinth afforded by his novels. Its author, Michael Ackland, outlines deftly the literary and artistic heritages that influenced Bail's early thought, then traces key preoccupations in his fiction and non-fiction, as well as provides authoritative interpretations of individual works. Equally adept in describing how painterly problems are adapted to speculative fiction, or in foregrounding the role played by diverse heritages of Western philosophy and science, Ackland explores the layered depths, conceits and lightning interplays that inform individual scenes, and reveals the Australian writer's immense ambitions. This study demonstrates Bail's work to be as contemporary as postmodernism, yet timeless in its probing of the human condition, and of what individuals may achieve in a world subject to both global forces and mutability. This is an important book for all literature, cultural studies, and Australasian collections.