The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail

Murray Bail is one of the most boldly innovative and intellectually challenging of contemporary writers. He is widely appreciated in his homeland, Australia. Although a casual reading of Bail's work affords shocks, laughter and stimulation aplenty, it usually raises of a host of questions that nag and tantalize readers for years to come. This is a legacy of his unambiguous declaration in favour of the novel of ideas and, above all, of bold invention and risk taking. Also his individual works can seem at first sight unrelated: a novel that recounts the world-wide peregrinations of tourists through museums, real and imaged (Homesickness); its sequel in a parodic novel of education that attacks Australian parochialism (Holden's Performance); followed by what Michael Ondaatje has called 'one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature' (Eucalyptus), and most recently the depiction of a failed attempt to live the life of an original thinker, which explores the rival interpretative claims of philosophy and psychology (The Pages).