The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

strength lay not in rote learning but in “imaginative recall” (Grealy 21). Long afterwards he remembered his father, a clerk in the Metropolitan Tramways, “with tired eyes: unsmiling melancholy” (L 21). Though his parent had often imbibed Darwin’s Origin of Species, “everything I know about him suggests it was to fuel his scepticism” (L 24). Even less edifying were memories of a grandfather who, after overseas service with the Light Horse Brigade, “ended up in South Africa in the police, burning down villages” (Davidson 271). Traits of both men are refracted in Bail’s second novel, as is his grim experience of materialistic, suburban Adelaide. Bail rebelled, too, against the prevalent indoctrination of youth with stories demonstrating Australian valour and white superiority. Unthinking patriotism he later derided as “Gallipolisation” (Davidson 270), and he has sweepingly asserted, “I loathe nationalism of any kind” (Lysenko 44).

This hostility would fuel much of Bail’s early fiction, including short stories not selected for inclusion in later books. Predominantly naturalistic narratives, these works do not accord with the experimental, transgressive modalities of Contemporaries Portraits and Other Stories or Holden’s Performance. Conceptually, however, they reveal Bail’s abiding disdain for the monotony, mediocrity, and constraints of his youth. Usually these tales focus on a male protagonist in extremis. The causes of his aggravated distress can be physical, such as a car breakdown and impending death in the Australian desert, or the less tangible threat of an existence warped by intellectual and emotional withering. Parker, the owner of a Queenslander house in Brisbane, is Bail’s typical suburbanite, bearing an expression variously dubbed blank, wooden, or simple, and who “seemed merely to continue, passing through the house and time. It was a life” (“Home Ownership” 96). Parallels between Parker’s existence and his increasingly rundown dwelling are numerous. Once their sparks of individuality and vitality—represented in a neglected wife and red front step—are snuffed out, the slide into dullness and tropical dilapidation is relentless. Other protagonists have been similarly “white-anted” (or eaten out from within by ants) by oppressive local circumstances. These doom Ian Milne to artistic mediocrity and perhaps worse: “The tragedy occurred