We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 115
SUMMER 2008
REVIEWS
FICTION
The Pages – Murray Bail, Text Publishing, 2008
Murray Bail’s most recent novel, The Pages, continues the quest for meaning and the impossibility of finding it which he first touted so gloriously in ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (Contemporary Portraits, 1975). In The Pages this quest takes place within a debate between psychology and philosophy as the emotionally stunted Wesley Antill beavers away at his self-assigned task of analysing and cataloguing human emotions in his attempt to construct a ‘word-model of the world’ as erected by ‘true philosophers’.
In ‘The Drover’s Wife’, Bail has the narrator muse over Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name and claim she isn’t the drover’s wife, she’s his wife, Hazel. Using a magnifying glass to examine a tiny figure in the background of the painting that he’s decided is the drover for whom she’s left him, the narrator discovers the closer he looks at the figure the more the image disappears into a series of brushstrokes.
Similarly in Holden’s Performance (1988) Uncle Vern, a man who ‘wanted to isolate things, to clarify them’, is ‘the most short-sighted man Holden was ever to meet’. And again in Eucalyptus (1998) the naming of thousands of eucalypts fails to reward the father who has set this as a task for potential suitors for his daughter.
Writing characters who interrogate an increasingly elusive subject puts Bail in great company. In his wonderfully comic novel, Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes has the narrator, Braithwaite, bathetically scrutinising the artefacts and minutiae of Gustave Flaubert’s life in order to know him. The hunt includes a search for the authentic stuffed parrot which
supposedly (when alive) sat on Flaubert’s desk as he wrote. (The quest ends with the narrator stumbling across three hundred parrots in the Museum of Modern History, any one of which could have been the prized parrot.) Meanwhile the death of the narrator’s wife rates only a glance in the hunt for Flaubertian memorabilia.As in Bail’s previous fiction, The Pages sees answers to ontologicalquestions dissolve under scrutiny. The reader (this one anyway) reads with empathy as Wesley’s life’s work trails off in a simplistic, unconnectedlitany of thoughts on emotion. From the beginning of the novel philosophy and psychology are set against each other, the premise being that the first doesn’t exist in Australia and the second doesn’t work. Australia doesn’t have the ‘conditions required for philosophical thought’ and psychology is an endless ‘excavation through words’ with
what appears to be the author’s resentment of it warning the reader to, ‘[t]read warily with those who have sisters in analysis’.
Despite his search for a philosophy, Wesley’s work falls into a space between these two schools of thought and it seems to me that it isn’t the outcome of the search – the actual ideas he comes up with – that Bail finds of value to the novel as much as the character’s determination to work on something of interest to him. This value on self is the locus for significance in The Pages. During an epiphany in Germany Wesley decides that,
without moving a centimetre I would come to regard my own self as a place to travel through, slowly, and, in an interested manner, examine, and through myself and myself alone attempt an explanation of the broader world.
And so, having found self-belief, he returns to work on his philosophy in the ‘plainness’ of his ‘dry-grass rural life’. In this novel Bail goes further than pointing the reader to the taxonomer’s scrutinising and ordering. He reveals the why of it as Wesley’s ‘effort of moving towards a philosophy becomes itself the philosophy’. Is this enough to sustain the novel though, particularly when the outcome of Wesley’s introspection is less than glittering?
Revelation is constantly deferred – just what is it Wesley has written in his pages? This piques reader interest and sustains tension but I found the final revelation disappointing even though what the character has written probably isn’t as important as the process of writing it. Like Barnes’ deliberately overlooked death of the narrator’s wife in Flaubert’s Parrot, there is something underdeveloped in The Pages.
The novel’s structure may hold a clue to a puzzling absence in the text. There are several narrative voices. The omniscient narrator describes the present. Wesley’s voice describes the past and another narrative voice speaks to the reader on the nature of philosophy and psychology – this is the one warning the reader about sisters in analysis. The novel’s movement between the past, the present, and the narrator’s observations
makes for an interestingly triple-stranded narrative but the novel’s ongoing promise of revelation about what Wesley’s pages contain reads like a prelude. I kept waiting for this story to get going; by the time it did the novel was finished. It was a bit of a letdown.
But along the way, Bail’s ever-sharp eye for an image is breathtaking. He’s able to distil a character’s occupation like noone else:
The solicitor was Mr Mannix. A large man, he had loose hanging cheeks, and pursed lips from the many years of putting words in parentheses.
And Wesley’s brother, Roger Antill had a drought-cracked forehead. His hair was combed straight back in furrows, as if he carried around inside his head, even in the moonlight, the Idea of the ploughed paddock.
The stand-out images of Freud’s red tasselled couch and Heidegger suspended in a deck chair like a ‘drop of water just above the grass’ (p 153) are more examples of a language that is crisp and original. Elegant and reflective, it laces the work with irony throughout in true Bail form.
The Pages argues for philosophy as thriving in ‘closeness to the original nature of things’. Bail is to be applauded for debating the ideas and practice of two huge European movements – for furrowing them into an Australian paddock somnolent with heat and sunlight and ancient indifference.
MARIA SIMMS is a writer whose historical crime novel, The Dead House, won New Holland Publishing’s Genre Fiction Award in 2007. It was released in August, 2008. She has worked
at Southern Cross University as a lecturer in creative writing as well as Head of Academic Support.
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