The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

of perception (L 2,7), as well as to achieve a heightened awareness of his surroundings and their creative potential. “Burton’s tomb (behind the Catholic church): the force exerted by a tent made of paradoxical material—concrete. A cross fitted absurdly above the Moslem crescent. Elsewhere weeds and rust” (L 72), for instance, would resonate in Bail’s mind until it served in Homesickness (1980) as a metonym for noble human endeavours checkmated by mutability. As he later stated: “There is no doubt that India, Europe and America did open me up” (Grealy 21).

More complexly, England—apart from providing enlarged cultural vistas—also afforded a repeated sense of encountering the origins of much that Bail had found most baneful in the Antipodes and thus fanned his subversive instinct. Profound inertia was almost palpable—“Some days the stagnancy of the British and everything they’ve left standing resembles one of those chipped enamel tubs raised from the ground by iron paws” (L 21)—and he noted that “the good sense and dreary stability of England, which extends into literature, provokes in me an opposing, forceful stance” (L 65). Initially, Bail was much impressed by London as a “flat maze [that] … closed in behind,” with “no ‘heart,’ no centre” (L 1). Later, he noted “this urge for classification” (L 12), a ubiquitous “glut of words—at office and national level” (L 17), and “the peculiar ordinariness of the British” (L 109). Admittedly, England’s common-sense, empirical approach to existence had produced major philosophical and technical advances, as well as enviably stable and inclusive forms of government. But it also set a premium on practical, utilitarian outcomes and encouraged a predominantly realist tradition in fiction—attributes that Bail identified with mainstream Australian writing. Bail himself, however, was seeking more and was bent on transgression. Although limited financial means undoubtedly dictated his choice of a basement dwelling, its surrounding bins and street life observable from below (“I can see the ankles of English people pass”; L 3) suited his drive for detachment and difference, “adding to the illusion—[of] not being British, not part of all this” (L 1), of “not belonging here”; “I am against the majority” (L 3). From this subterranean cell Bail would graduate years later to various minimalist, white workspaces