The Australian writer Gerald Murnane is one of the literary world’s idiosyncrasies. His work is demanding enough to attract regular tips for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but irresistible enough to give him a dedicated more-than-cult following. He attracts praise from writers such as JM Coetzee: he is the Nobel laureate’s Nobel-laureate-in-waiting. Sheffield-based publisher And Other Stories has done sterling work in the last six years to bring Murnane’s work back into print.
Murnane writes about himself, or more accurately about a “personage” (a favourite Murnane word) who to all intents and purposes is Murnane. All of his mature fiction, barring a couple of early novels, comprises what he calls “no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of [my] mind”.
These contents are what most of us would call memories, but which Murnane thinks of as images. Even when recalling a favourite book – and of the thousand books he read from the 1960s to the 1990s, only “twenty or so had left on me some sort of lasting impression” – what he remembers is not the plot or characters but the experience of reading: “those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read”.
[ Gerald Murnane: ‘I could be killed by my own writing’Opens in new window ]
There is, as this suggests, an intense single-mindedness to Murnane’s work – a literal manifestation of the fact that, he says, he writes everything by typing with one finger. It’s a hermetically sealed world that can be hard to break into, but it’s worth making the journey. One of his novels, Inland, turns repeatedly to a sentence from the poet Paul Éluard: “There is another world but it is in this one” – as good a description of a work of fiction as we could ask for. And now we have a reissue of a novel – sorry, “fiction” – first published in 2009, 14 years after Murnane had declared himself done with writing fiction.
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Barley Patch, then, is a book of fiction explaining why he has stopped writing fiction. That’s very Murnane. And in a sense Barley Patch is his most Murnane work of all, the central text to which the earlier books led and from which the later books flow. Less a stand-alone novel than an episode of his great ongoing project, it contains all the elements Murnane-watchers expect: highly attuned memory, a specific sense of place, familiar subject matter (books, childhood love, horse racing), his fears (fast flowing water, meals prepared by other people) and a quietly mischievous quality.
The books Murnane discusses include Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and adventure comics of his youth. These work as examples of what Murnane himself does not, cannot, do – literature of the imagination. “I had never created any character or imagined any plot” in his own fiction, Murnane writes. “I had no imagination.” Perhaps making a virtue out of a necessity, imagination is not what he values anyway: he prefers to present experiences in perfectly grammatical prose, and he reads each sentence he writes aloud, working and reworking it until he is satisfied.
This makes the reading of Murnane’s prose a pleasing process for the reader too, and it works best in a traditional sense when Murnane – or the Murnane surrogate (“I would remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction”) – is recalling his past, rather than talking about books. There is a charming and touching sequence about an early girlfriend who grew apart from him because the young Murnane couldn’t resist spending his time with her “explaining how one or another poem or work of fiction that I had read recently affected me”.
There is also evidence that Murnane does after all have imagination, because of the creativity with which he shapes other stories from his past. We get a drily funny account of visiting a monk, who subsequently quits the monastery with a stolen pair of binoculars that he takes to a horse race (Murnane in tow) and makes up for lost time by quickly acquiring a girlfriend (“somewhat plump and dressed in pink”). Elsewhere Murnane reports how a nun once told him she was disappointed in his work because of the sex in it. Murnane observes, with inevitable precision, that of the half million words of his fiction to that point, “no more than 150 [words] could be said to describe an act of sexual intercourse [and] only two refer to any part of the human body: the words are hands and knees.”
In a sense Murnane’s books work best in accumulation – which makes it hard to recommend the best point to begin. Barley Patch, being so central to his output, is probably not the one: The Plains or even an early novel like Tamarisk Row is more friendly to the newcomer.
When I interviewed him for this paper in 2023, Murnane observed that he had given up writing four times, “but this time it’s for good”. He immediately qualified that – he is still writing, even if not publishing. There will be more, and we should be glad.
