The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

of literary myxomatosis, reducing any remaining dun-coloured realism to a few pockets” (Bail, Introduction xvii). But the loose associations that generated the New Writing were short lived, its exponents destined to follow diverging trajectories (Gelder and Salzman 1–25; Bennett 179–182). For Bail this involved a shift from short fiction—which he had come to see as technically exhilarating but limiting—to ingenious, multilayered novels that tease and test even the most attentive reader.

This uncompromising attitude towards his audience is, in part, a product of Bail’s upbringing in a society with narrow intellectual and behavioural codes. His childhood and adolescent years, which form the backdrop to his second novel, Holden’s Performance (1987), coincided with unprecedented improvements in local living standards, burgeoning complacency, and the longest serving federal government in Australian history. As industry redirected its energies from producing war materials to manufacturing consumer durables, the deprivations of the Great Depression and wartime rationing were banished from the majority of households. Australian homes began to accumulate labour-saving appliances, its roads chrome-laden automobiles. The main clouds threatening these brilliant bourgeois vistas were communism and the escalating Cold War—and their consequences feature prominently in the latter part of Holden’s Performance. By the mid-1950s communist forces had rampaged through China, Hungary, and the Korean peninsula, while the Soviet Union’s rapid acquisition of atomic and missile technology fuelled fears of spying and subversion. The United States was gripped by an unprecedented wave of anticommunist hysteria. Defamatory slurs and political witchhunts threatened to paralyse dissent, at home and abroad. In Australia the Labour Party split disastrously in 1954 over the issue of communist infiltration, opening the way for a Liberal–Country Party coalition to hold power in Canberra from 1949 to 1972. For much of this time the coalition’s leader was Sir Robert Menzies. Regally bestriding the Australian political stage, he took credit for national affluence, encouraged parochialism, and waged a successful series of “khaki” elections, which stressed the need for patriotic vigilance and armed deterrence of the Red menace. In Holden’s Performance this