Gerald Murnane – Barley Patch

The name Murnane was new to me, showing how insular one’s literary preoccupations can be. My knowledge of Australian novelists was limited to Voss by Patrick White, a savage tale of a doomed expedition into the centre of the continent in colonial times. I have read half of Barley Patch, enough to convince me that much has emerged, since the 20th Century, from that land-mass.

The controlled ironical/humorous tone of Murnane’s recollection – which he insists is fictional – kept me reading slowly. This was a breadth of expression and control of sentence that I had not seen in writing so recent. Always self-deprecating, never pompous. A mastery of literary prose. He is eighty-five now and was somewhat less-aged when he wrote Barley Patch. The memories dwell more on childhood and youth rather than full adulthood, and while we learn much about life in Victoria post-war, the writer etches rather than fills his canvas, the details scarce but significant, the description never self-conscious. The accompanying conclusions he draws go to the root of his practice as a writer of fiction .

An apparent decision taken at some point in his career to give up both the reading and of fiction provides the context: ‘Why do I write?’, a question he would pose his students as they began their studies. This novel/autobiography/critical work, is his circumlocutory attempt to answer his own question.

Having not read much more than half the book I can offer no spoiler in the form of his answer. Enough to say that, at least in the context of this work of ‘fiction’, there is a link between one’s early fiction-reading and the way the reader may pictorialize the story, despite the best efforts of its author to provide graphic description. As an adult reader too, ‘real-life’ persons may creep in to enact the narrative, in place of those characters created by the author. And as to physical background, Murnane’s enquiry found that Murnane the child had an inner landscape derived from comics and other popular literature, and that the landscape would remain, to be peopled eventually by characters of his own making.

Having not completed my own reading of Barley Patch I am unable to draw a conclusion. But I have of course read the ‘blurb’, which tells me that the writer comes to a realisation of the necessity of fiction, its creation and its consumption. While to me this is an axiom, I nevertheless am grateful to Murnane. I never before understood how it all worked.