The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

within the walls of his [Greek] house … [but] began among the hedges of a Melbourne suburb somewhere, with a sister or two, heavy ticking clock, his father and Sunday lunch” (“Still Life” 17). Like Wesley Antill in Bail’s later The Pages, Milne confuses “ability for hard work with talent” (“Still Life” 21). In default and in denial, Milne sees his life become a series of elaborately staged set pieces in locations meant to inspire him—from the Greek islands to London. And the narrator’s summary judgment on Milne fits the would-be philosopher Antill, as well: “He was not necessarily an artist, but he believed he was: he had invested so much stubbornness” (21).

Tellingly, too, the uncollected stories contain precursors of Bail’s later empiricists. These men combine problematic eyesight with excessive zeal and blindness to defunct relationships. They range from an aging fire spotter isolated in a watchtower to a young thesis writer whose interest in local measurement has been narrowed to the standard yard. The first man, obsessed with creating neatness and order, is last seen weeding “the whole forest [convinced] it will soon be tidy, almost like my painted tower” (“I Spend” 7). His younger counterpart, Rodney, has gone to a race course to examine an official representation of the yard, kept in a glass case attached to a wall of the grandstand. While savvy locals flee during torrential rain, Rodney drinks, sleeps, then finds himself alone in the grandstand, cut off from the outside world by rising floodwaters. “Bad at reading elementary signs” (“Rough” 9), he has faith in measurement as a way of managing reality. Impotently, Rodney counts the grandstand’s remaining dry steps and passing bottles, or tries to imagine Annie’s “‘location’ as wife” (11)—little dreaming of her serial adultery with “the Lecturer in Logic” (10). Rodney is an ardent believer in “putting things into perspective—one of the great achievements of man” (10)—which in practice means he believes illogically that actions like cleaning up the grandstand increase his chance of rescue (11). The community shares his belief. Its media cover the flood from the air, beam images of it nationwide, send out various search parties, but miss the tragedy of Rodney’s plight. Both the glass specimen case and Rodney’s carefully constructed existence have hung by a nail or a thread that now gives way. Rodney, like the fire spotter, is out of step with