The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

his times and doomed. According to the prejudiced lecturer, Rodney is “too boring by half. No panache. He’s in another world … too factual for this country and you” (16). Nevertheless, Rodney’s opening hypothesis, that the unit of measurement “adopted” by society “infiltrates its culture” (10), prefigures a central thesis of Holden’s Performance about the baneful effects of transplanted methodologies.

These motifs, repeated obsessively in Bail’s major fiction, conjecturally highlight not only revolt against the Australia of his youth but also anxiety about entrapment, discernible in “Albie” (1969). A rare coming-of-age story in the author’s oeuvre, it depicts crucial life lessons that Bail, unlike the narrator Maurice, has obviously taken to heart. The tale contrasts the adult world of staid, conventional parents—that is, Albie Fewster and his ample wife—with that of the impressionable Trevor and Maurice, who visit the Fewsters’ home to learn to dance and gradually learn much more. Albie represents Australian male behaviour in all its seductiveness and limitations. His familiarity and unfeigned friendliness are immediately attractive. He flatteringly treats the boys as fellow men knowledgeable in the ways of women and the world. Maurice finds everything about Albie engaging, from his nonchalance in exhaling cigarette smoke or letting a match burn down almost to his fingertips to his effortless dancing, good nature, and easy casualness. In comparison, Maurice’s father—remembered in terms of his job “in a square cave of an office”—is far less alluring: merely one of the anonymous “grey-skinned honest men worrying about figures, what’s in the IN-basket, and pencils signed for by the Chief Clerk” (“Albie” 6). Yet it is the apparently superior man who has a grotesquely fat wife, an equally undesirable home, and no prospects: he is passed over for a promotion that Maurice’s father receives. “Albie seemed to be unfairly anchored to darkness, unimportance, the brown rooms of his squashed rented house” (7). A warm admirer of Albie, Maurice is therefore stunned, when sent to console the suddenly widowed Mrs Fewster, by her buoyant spirits and shocking revelation: “It was him who had me messed up … He was the trouble …You’ve no idea, you boys, he sometimes hit me. This place …I hate it” (9).