The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

They parted a furrow through a corridor of waist-high grasses which swayed and rippled in the turbulence [of the motorcycle]. When the road shifted a few points towards the setting sun the bleached paddocks, the low hills to the right, and even the trunks of occasional gum trees were over-run by a lava of blinding orange. All this Holden saw with his head to one side. (HP 55)

Similarly auspicious was Bail’s discovery that same year, 1973, of the intricately woven fiction of Michel Tournier. Uncannily, the attributes registered by Bail prefigured his own major works: “With little warning I read a novel of commanding force, intelligence. The Erl King. Through his thoughts the author himself [Tournier] almost becomes the most interesting character” (L 91). Bail devoured the book in a single sitting. Subsequently, Tournier earned accolades for engaging with and creating the resonances of myth, for tackling such important issues as humanity’s “relationship to time and history” and for “all kinds of speculation”: “He’s a novelist of ideas. And he exhibits a very strong narrative drive, takes risks, superb risks, and he doesn’t muck around with the local, telling us what it’s like to be a Frenchman” (Davidson 275). Here was further encouragement to stretch the boundaries of fiction, but this was not a model for imitation. Instead, when Bail later needed a few pages of inspirational reading to set himself up for a day’s writing, it was to Kafka or to White’s epochal Riders in the Chariots that he acknowledged turning (“Unpacking” 13).

From the outset, then, Bail aspired to be a novelist of ideas rather than of characters. Pronouncing himself “prepared to break all the rules,” he put a premium on “force and individuality” (Chisholm 42)—determined that his work should never display “that peculiar tell-tale thinness of the second hand” (IF 149). Far better “the bold assertion coming in at an unexpected angle … that throws off an infectious energy” (Bail, “Continental” 34) than decorum and plainness. He had, he claimed, “a supremely high regard for literature,” and a firm persuasion of the “high seriousness” of his calling (Chisholm 42). Setting himself stern standards, Bail entered