The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

“The Prodigal Son,” still spoke to the heart of the local dilemma as Bail conceived it, the realist tradition. “It’s the great curse in Australian literature. It’s part of that Anglo-Saxon pragmatic, prosaic, empirical heritage we got from England” (Sayers 26). Moreover, his precursor’s novels, which continued to appear until 1986, demonstrated heroically what was possible. “Above all this stands the prose works of Patrick White. To my mind he continues to take alarming risks for which we should all be grateful” (“Questionnaire on Fiction” 188). And Bail, in his writing, has signalled continuities and accord with White’s manifesto by echoing its key terms, “dun-coloured” and “prodigal son.” Both men, too, were deeply influenced by contemporary art; White even acknowledged in himself “always something of a frustrated artist” (White 559). Contemporary art fired a willingness to experiment boldly, though the older man had undoubtedly faced a far more intolerant and hostile society in the 1950s than Bail did after him. The treatment meted out then, according to Bail, was “deplorable. Patrick White really deserves the Victoria Cross, not just the Nobel Prize [awarded in 1973], for what he went through” (Chisholm 41). Finally, Bail also sought ways to overcome a perceived “thinness on the ground” and social intercourse that was “cripplingly laconic.” White had “got around” this “by imposing his own deep thinking upon his characters”; Bail looked to other models (Davidson 271–272).

In particular, he turned his gaze towards European literature and philosophy. Whereas Bail viewed American and English letters as “saddled with the good sense of Protestant empiricism” and—in spite of occasional pyrotechnics—as imbued with a “stubborn underlying realism,” across the Channel writers had developed exciting alternatives to character-centred fiction (Bail, “Continental” 34). Here he encountered works preoccupied with concepts, myths, and theoretical issues, like his own first novel, Homesickness. When asked to name authors whose writing he endeavoured to stay abreast of, Bail cited principally French and Latin American authors, including Rozelle, Tournier, Borges, and Marquez. He added the Italian Calvino, as well as Grass and Bernhard from German-speaking central Europe, before finally including Pynchon and, of course, Patrick