Category: Gerald Murnane

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2018), 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia, Author, Book review, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Fiction, Gerald Murnane, literary fiction, Literary prizes, postmodern literature, Publisher, Setting

‘Border Districts: A Fiction’ by Gerald Murnane

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Border Districts
US Edition (available in UK)

Fiction – hardcover; Farrar Straus and Giroux; 134 pages; 2018.

For a slight book, Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts: A Fiction packs a very large punch. Well, not so much a punch, but a tickling of the grey matter, for this is a novel — supposedly Murnane’s last (he’s 79) — that makes you see the world in new ways and makes you reflect on concepts you may never have thought of before.

Billed as fiction, the story mirrors Murnane’s real life move from Melbourne to a provincial town on the border between Victoria and South Australia and the impact of that shift on his interior life.

Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression.

Written stream-of-consciousness style and employing some of the devices of meta-fiction, Border Districts is the type of novel that could be labelled “experimental” — it certainly doesn’t comply with the normal conventions of the literary novel, blurring the lines between fiction, non-fiction and reportage. Indeed, the story is written as if it is a report and the (nameless) author of the report keeps reminding us of this fact.

Border districts Australian edition
Australian edition (published by Giramondo)

The story is essentially about memory or, more accurately, the landscape of the mind. It explores how recall and imagery works, how sights and smells and music and words and even the way the light falls can trigger the mind to remember things from the past, taking the narrator on tangential journeys through back history, and how our experience shapes what we reminisce about.

It begins with the narrator noticing how the colour of the translucent glass in a local church window changes from day-to-day depending on the light (hence the pieces of coloured glass that adorn the American edition of the book), which reminds him of the glass in the chapel at the Catholic school he attended. From there his mind spirals into all kinds of memories — from his childhood education to his thoughts on Catholicism to his life in the capital city and his love of horse racing — before returning to where it started, trying to “recall the details of the windows of the chapel in the grounds of my secondary school”.

It is, to be perfectly frank (and please excuse the language), a bit of a mind fuck.

The writing is eloquent and full of astonishing detail and insight. Stylistically, each paragraph begins with short, taut sentences that later become elongated, stretched to breaking point and turning back on themselves. We are constantly reminded this is a book being written, with phrases such as “while I was writing the previous paragraph” dotted throughout the text and which, for this reader at least, soon began to wear very thin.

This is definitely not a book to race through despite its novella-like length. It took me more than a week because it was mentally exhausting to digest and I needed time to savour it in small chunks. Admittedly, I was relieved when I got to the end, but I did appreciate the way it made me reflect on things. This is the kind of writing that is focused on ideas and concepts rather than on plots and action and character, so you really need to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it.

I have read Gerald Murnane before — I described The Plains, arguably his most famous novel, as “surreal” and thought his style was very Kafka-like — so it wasn’t a complete surprise to find this book cut from similar cloth. It has been shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, the first time Murnane has been nominated in a career spanning almost 50 years. We will find out tomorrow (August 26) whether he has won it.

This is my 13th book for #20booksofsummer and my 5th for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2018. I bought it in April (before the longlist announcement) because it had attracted a bit of publicity  — probably because Murnane said it was the last book he would ever write and there was a rumour going round that he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature — and Lisa at ANZ LitLovers reviewed it very favourably, which piqued my interest even further.

Author, Fiction, Gerald Murnane, literary fiction, Publisher, Text Classics

‘The Plains’ by Gerald Murnane

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The Plains by Gerald Murane

Fiction – paperback; Text Classics; 192 pages; 2013.

When I first embarked on my project to read exclusively Australian literature for a year, I was excited by the prospect of discovering some intriguing — and perhaps unusual — titles lurking in my tottering TBR pile. What I hadn’t expected, when I picked up Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, was to find the Australian equivalent of Kafka on my shelf. Indeed, this novel, which was first published in 1982, took me on such a surreal journey I’m still not quite sure if I fully “got” what it was about. And I suspect each person who reads it comes to a different interpretation of events.

An unusual story

The Plains was Murnane’s third novel — he’s written eight more since then and has recently published his memoir — but this was the first of his that I had read, so I have no idea if this story is typical of his style or subject. It’s essentially an allegory, which is neatly summed up by the opening lines:

Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

In it, the unnamed narrator ventures to inland Australia, where he plans to make a film about the people who live there. He stays in a hotel in a remote town and spends most of his time drinking with the locals as part of his research. He does not tell them his real reason for visiting because he doesn’t want to scare them off or to prejudice their behaviour towards him: he wants to study the “real” plainsmen and find out about their cultures and customs.

When he discovers that there is a chance to petition some of the richest landowners in the region for patronage, he throws his name in the hat and wins funding from a wealthy plainsman. And then he spends the next two decades living on his property without once filming a single frame…

A curious and playful novel

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this curious novel is the playful way in which Murnane turns many ideas about Australia on their head. I don’t think you have to be Australian to appreciate that most of the population lives on the coastal fringes and rarely, if ever, ventures into the interior (or outback), which is regarded as a cultural wasteland. But in The Plains, Murnane suggests that the reverse is true: the fringe-dwellers live on the “sterile margins of the continent”, where the culture of the capital cities is “despised”, while the plainsmen comprise a varied assortment of intellectuals, artists, musicians, poets and writers who lead rich and stimulating lives, not without their own cultural “spats” and feuds.

Murnane also challenges the notion of the “cultural cringe” — where Australians dismiss their own culture in the belief that it is inferior to the Old Country — by portraying the culture of the plainsmen as being just as sophisticated, if not more so, than anything Britain could offer. And he plays with the idea of high culture influencing the nation’s politics and sense of self:

The Brotherhood of the Endless Plain devoted themselves to an elaborate scheme for transforming Australia into a Union of States whose seat of government was far inland and whose culture welled up from its plains and spilled outwards. The coastal districts would then be seen as a mere borderland where truly Australian customs were debased by contact with the Old World. The League of Heartlanders wanted nothing less than a separate Republic of the Plains with manned frontier-posts on every road and railway line that crossed the Great Dividing Range.

And, of course, he also debunks the myth that the great open spaces of the landscape are empty: if you look closer “what had at first seemed utterly flat and featureless eventually disclosed countless subtle variations of landscape and an abundance of wildlife”.

Languid prose style

This might make the book sound a bit “stuffy” and “intellectual” and hard work, but it’s not. It’s playful and often humorous — there’s certainly a lot of poking fun at the pomposity of Australian cultural snobbery — and it’s written in such a languid, almost limpid style, that it feels effortless to read.

Admittedly I was about a quarter-way through the book before I clocked it was a fable, and then I suddenly began to see the metaphors and little digs at preconceived notions of how landscape and location marks out certain Australians from other Australians. I can’t pretend I understood everything Murnane was alluding to, but it certainly tickled my brain matter in a way I hadn’t expected when I plucked it from the shelf.

It felt like something Kafka might have cooked up with Magnus Mills if the two of them spent some time Down Under.

For other takes on this novel, please visit Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers and Tony’s review at Tony’s Reading List. Sue at Whispering Gums has also reviewed it.

This is my ninth book for #ReadingAustralia2016.

This book is published in both ebook and paperback format and is available in the UK, US and Canada.