The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

Although Maurice at the end is left “pushing through all the half dark” (“Albie” 9), the tale’s import is crystal clear. The quotidian realm of local manhood is characterised professionally as grey, routine, subordinate, and focused on trivial calculations. Socially, its attainments scarcely rise above the rites of a friendly smoke. Its typically laidback, genial behaviour is a recipe for drabness, inertia, and insignificance. Its darker by-products are intellectual penury, emotional warping, and superficial (at times dysfunctional) relationships—a verdict reiterated two decades later in “The Seduction of My Sister,” in which the narrator happily inherits these very traits, which have been faithfully replicated by his father. Unquestionably, Albie’s achievements and talents are nugatory. But they represent a pervasive local model and a potential undertow that Bail had to escape lest he become another Ian Milne, devoid of inspiration and the courage to be different. Milne’s was indeed, to quote that story’s title, a “Still Life with Lemons.” Bail was determined not to drink the same bitter dregs, not to have his existence measured out by the ticking metronomes of social conventions and family rituals, not to live the creativity-sapping life of a mental troglodyte. He was resolved that it would not be said of him, as Bail himself said of Rodney Templeton, that here was another “classic example of opportunity passing him by” (“Rough” 14).

Boredom and this conjectured dread spawned a desire for movement and wider horizons. A self-professed late developer, Bail was drawn initially to racing cars and motorbikes rather than set curricula (Grealy). For a time he attended art school in the evening; painting would remain a consuming interest, though he was “morbidly—pessimistically—fascinated by photography” (Lysenko 45). By the time he reached his midtwenties, he had compromised with local realities, married, and embarked on what would be a thirteen-year career in advertising, which, with journalism, he later caustically branded one of the twin “Australian Hollywoods” that threatened to sap genuine creative energy (Davidson 274). From peddling copy on a bicycle, he eventually graduated to copywriting and composing short stories in Melbourne, but the move from Adelaide brought only limited mental reprieve. Modernism had arrived late in