The writer as mapmaker

Some of the narrators of Gerald Murnane’s novels and stories tend to view oceans and coastlines with the fear and loathing of flat earth believers. Just the whiff of the sea breeze is enough to spoil the day for them, the grit and the glare of sun-touched sand distresses them and they speak with contempt of the ‘idiot noise’ of the sea and of those who swim and play in the waves and on the beaches. Seaside holidays, they imply, are for frivolous people stupidly turning a blind eye to the ocean’s treachery – its dark moods, its black holes, and its sinister capacity to gnaw at and dissolve something as solid as rock. One of the unnamed guides who pilots the reader across the broad expanses of Murnane’s new novel, Inland, likes plains and grasslands because, among other things, they make him forget his fear of drowning: ‘When the wind makes waves in the grass, I lie under the leaning stems. I am not afraid of drowning in grass … I expect to find one day that I can walk easily across all the grasslands of the world: I can walk easily because the sea and the deep rivers have shrunk to the covers and the margins of the pages of the world.’ Inland is a teasing maze of a book. An expansion of the themes Murnane explored in The Plains and Landscape with Landscape, it begins on a Hungarian plain, ends in Melbourne’s Fawkner cemetery and covers such a lot of ground, both geographic and intellectual, that perhaps it’s best read with an atlas at one’s elbow and an introduction to Lévi-Strauss at the other. Murnane is interested here in the big picture – in the myths, the dreams, and the perceptions which unite his land-locked narrators with others like themselves and which define the writer’s complex relationship with his readers. At the front of the book is one of Hemingway’s many prescriptions for those suffering the desire to write: ‘I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect … Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead’. The Hungarian who first leads us into Murnane’s literary maze is a landowner writing from the library of his manor house for a magazine called Hinterland, which is published far away in America’s Middle West by an Institute of Prairie Studies in South Dakota. The Hungarian writes about the plant life of his flatlands while speculating silently about the life his editor and translator leads on her own stretch of prairie. They have never met, yet he has become so strongly attached to the idea of this woman that he fantasises about plots and intrigues designed to threaten both his relationship with her and her ambition to become editor of Hinterland. Through the dreams and musings of this Hungarian writer, the next twist in the maze takes us to South Dakota and the offices of Hinterland in ‘a skyscraper of marble and glass on the Great Plain of America’, then back to Hungary where everything that the writer writes is now conditioned by his belief that he is no longer being read by her editor but by one of her rivals. Writerly paranoia mounts, then, with minimum explanation, things abruptly move on again – to Australia and Murnane’s home ground, the outer suburbs of Melbourne and the country around Bendigo. Suddenly there is a new narrator, who takes us first on a trip to the despised seaside where he spent time during his childhood then goes on to recall the other places where he lived while growing up. The geographic patterns of his childhood, it seems, were formed in a strangely arbitrary way. The family moved houses and neighbourhoods according to his father’s efforts to escape his gambling debts. The themes and motifs which recur in the novel are already familiar to Murnane readers. There is the chairbound narrator whose dreams do his travelling for him – a man who still longs for the girls he loved as an adolescent. He spends long hours sorting, re-arranging and reinterpreting his memories, and his attitude to them changes with time and circumstance, just like his responses to the books he reads and the photographs and paintings he studies. Books, he decides, are not windows, as he had originally supposed, but mirrors. He looks into them for images which reflect his own feelings and experiences back at him. This discovery occurs to him one day when he is re-reading parts of two of his favourite novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights, and he realises that he is not seeing the vales of Hardy’s England or the moorland of Emily Bronte’s but a grass paddock near the north Melbourne suburb which was one of his childhood homes. He sees patterns in everything – in the winds and the weather, in ‘the colours and seasons of the church’, in the way street names and surnames conjure up past associations, and in the imaginings of the Melbourne narrator, details are planted to link him with the Hungarian, who has often addressed the reader directly, observing at one point that we are all maps marked with the places of our lives – but not just with the places we have been: ‘There are still to mark all these places you have dreamed about and all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about … Whatever places you saw at such times … must all appear on the map of the true part of you’. The effect of all this is to evoke immense admiration for Murnane’s ingenuity. The structuralist view is rarely given as eloquent and as elegant a workout as it gets here. Each image and idea is gracefully realised and gracefully flows on to the next. I have used the metaphor of the maze, but one of Murnane’s waving grassland paddocks, surging and shimmering under a hot wind would be better. Yet there’s an understandable flatness in it, too, and for a coastal person like me, a certain claustrophobia in the underlying message – that wherever you go, it’ll be much the same as where you’ve already been.

Sandra Hall

From the New Issue

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

‘Calm Voice’, a new poem by Anders Villani

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