The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

Bail’s story offers diverging answers to this conundrum. At one stage the compelling narrative of Kathy and Masood is brusquely interrupted by the narrator’s recollection of “an incident from last Thursday, the 12th. This is an intrusion, but from ‘real life.’ The words in the following paragraph reconstruct the event as remembered. As accurately as possible, of course” (178). Then follows the tale of a beggar who shows casual drinkers in a bar dog-eared photos of random burials before putting out his hand. Presumably, this usually garners a coin to ward off both the beggar and the fate evoked by his memento mori. Without the human interest supplied by this surmise, however, the episode is inconsequential, virtually meaningless, and far less engrossing than the lovers’ drama, irrespective of the speaker’s insistence on meticulous accuracy and empirical “truth.” Moreover, the description of the incident breaks off midsentence (“The barman spoke: ‘Odd way to earn a living. He’s been doing that for’”;179), signifying at least that existence has no closure outside the realms of fiction—despite so-called objective, neatly framed accounts of it. “Real life,” then, fades before and seems secondary to its imaginative variant and becomes, in any case, “events as remembered.” Yet there are realities and univocal readings that cannot be ignored. Embassy officials insist on a master or imperial code of behaviour: one form of dress, precise temporal observances, duty as well as decency. Flagrant breeches cost Kathy her job, leaving her at the story’s end in London, which (like its governing values) has never ceased to exist or to exert a very real sway.

Fittingly, “A B C” concludes with countervailing evidence of the power of artistic depictions. A disgraced Kathy in London unexpectedly receives Masood’s self-portrait (“quite a striking resemblance”) in the mail:

His face, leaning against the tea-pot, stares across at Kathy weeping.
      She cannot help thinking of him; of his appearance.
      Words. These marks on paper, and so on. (“A B C” 183)

Authoritarian codes undoubtedly have the capacity to bite—hence Kathy’s dismissal—yet so, too, do imaginative ones, as her tears attest through