Eucalyptus: A novel
Text Publishing, $29.95 hb, 255 pp
Eucalyptus: A novel by Murray Bail
Murray Bail has passed muster as an important Australian novelist for quite a while now. His 1980 novel Homesickness, with its sustained parodic conceit of Australian tourists forever entering the prefab theme park, rather than its ‘real’ original, was an early national venture into what might have been postmodernism. Holden's Performance, a good time later, was as unyielding in its comedy, its surrealism, and its ungainly effortful lurch towards art. The ungainliness with Bail is part and parcel of whatever triumph there is (and it can be considerable). He is to fiction-writing something like what Buster Keaton was to the life of the body. There is a stoical sadness and solemnity to his fictions (which resemble even the more magical forms of realistic novel writing the way a slab hut resembles a townhouse) that comes it seems from the author’s incomprehension and incapacity in the face of anything like novelese. The husband of Helen Garner seems as incapable of telling an involving transparent story where the characters come off the page as he is of flying at the moon. On the contrary, he is a kind of homespun modernist, the sophistication of whose handling of his material is in inverse relation to his own narrative suavity.
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Comment (1)
Murray Bail seems to be incapable of writing simple sentences. The complexity of his ramblings are highly self-indulgent and at times impossible to comprehend. Sometimes I had to reread three times to interpret the intention of a passage. At times I got totally annoyed and declared that the passage was rubbish.
Luckily, it was written in the 1990’s.( Before the Me Too movement) Otherwise the feedback may not have been so favorable and awards may not have been forthcoming.
The attempts at sounding highly intellectual by using botanical terms and complicated species names was boring and pretentious.
Distractions to the plot in the forms of innumerable obscure tales that at times were incomplete and lacking in relevance (related by the stranger) were mostly highly annoying .
Sexual undertones where father and daughter were naked was disturbing and generally, sexual tension was presented in an unrealistic and clumsy way.
In fact I found it a sad, badly written tale of a lonely, disempowered daughter who was confined and controlled and then almost sold off at the whim of a dominating, obsessive and selfish father.
I would never have continued to finish the unimpressive diatribe hadn’t it been for the fact that we had to read it for book club .
Murray Bail, you can do better than this!
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