The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

extraordinarily able conservative appears as the fatuous Prime Minister R.G. Amen, notable chiefly for prominent eyebrows, stupefying oratory, puerile adulation of the British royal family, and overweening vanity.

Bail, like many intellectuals of his generation, recalled these decades with disdain and scarcely concealed loathing. It was, he has stated, “a drought time of conservatism, conformity and censorship, the R.G. Menzies era” (Bail, Introduction xv). He experienced his hometown as overwhelmingly reactionary, Protestant, and fiercely defensive of time-honoured English standards: in short, “it was … so closed and strict” and philistine. “If I’d stayed in Adelaide, I couldn’t have completed these things [his early books]” (Grealy). There, conduct was firmly regulated; judgments were starkly black and white. Shades of grey or of black, which would later fascinate Bail in communities overseas or in the tantalising canvases of Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, were anathema. Society seemed obsessed with money and practicalities. Bail pinpointed its characteristic wedding of small-mindedness with self-important pretensions years later when he noted of Gulliver’s Travels that Swift’s precise coordinate of 30˚2" south “doesn’t exactly match Lilliput on his map—the island is inland, somewhere in South Australia, perilously close to Adelaide” (“Imagining” 1330). A similarly stultifying mindset held sway in other state capitals and was a hallmark, according to Bail, of this “time of boredom and emptiness—of almost deafening emptiness” (Lysenko 38). The corollary of a land and people intellectually parched, culturally bereft was a literature “somehow affected by a desert wind. I find most of it dry, curiously empty, akin to journalism,” and in need of energetic overhaul (Bail, “Questionnaire on Fiction” 188).

Nor did home life provide compensating enrichment or buoyancy, so that allegedly Bail became “actually quite warped, like a dwarf” (Grealy 21). This bitter simile was inspired by an education system with which he failed to engage and by a dull, circumscribed existence with three siblings in the modest bungalow sprawl of Tranmere. At Norwood Technical High School he was “quite a flop—I didn’t take it seriously”; Bail’s