KEY POINTS:
Murray Bail's The Pages may well be a much-anticipated read for those following his work. His earlier novel, Homesickness, was a fluid, wry and generously spirited account of mostly antipodean tourists travelling in Europe.
His novel Eucalyptus won both the 1999 Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, which surprised those who found it a poorly characterised and pallid fable. Across the ditch it was a best-seller - perhaps its nationalistic and jingoistic qualities made Australians clasp it to their bosoms.
A New Zealand novel with the same qualities would end by being pulped. Ten years later, Bail presents us with another rural Australian tale. Erica, a philosophy lecturer, is invited to read the pages left behind by Wesley, an aspiring philosopher.
On the long drive west from Sydney across the Blue Mountains and the plains beyond, she is accompanied by her friend Sophie, a psychoanalyst. Both women are in their 40s: single, self-conscious, unhappy, mean-spirited and, ultimately, unattractive human beings.
Bail uses their occupations and hometown to debate in alternative chapters the relative merits of philosophy and psychoanalysis and to offer banal statements about Sydney in our era: "At the very word 'philosophy', people in Sydney run away in droves, reach for the revolver; they look down at their shoes, they smile indulgently; they go blank" and further, "In Sydney it's hard to bump into anyone who isn't in analysis, or has been, or is about to be."
The narrator of these chapters could be Wesley or Erica, or the author himself, but the voice has nothing to differentiate it from the same distant, analytical voice that describes the arrival of the women at the farm and the sojourn there with Roger and Lindsey, Wesley's unmarried brother and sister.
Sophie frets about her unavailable lover back in Sydney; strong, silent Roger works the farm; kind, one-dimensional Lindsey wields the teapot; while academic Erica begins on the pages. Wesley's life's work is piled in heaps in a disused woolshed with a hard wooden chair and a half-empty bottle of tomato sauce. Bail gives Erica no hopes or expectations for what she may discover.
We begin to interweave between the group on the farm and Wesley's story as a young man in Sydney conducting affairs and attending university. At first this is told in the same distant third-person voice but suddenly, towards the middle of the book, the first person intervenes with Wesley giving an account of his travels in Europe. Sophie heads for the hills having decided she can hold on to her married lover by making him a client, and Erica and Roger begin a mild flirtation.
Roger recounts that his brother returned from Europe with post-trauma white hair and holed up in the woolshed to philosophise. His life's work, Erica comes to the conclusion, was an attempt to "construct a theory of emotions".
Ironically, there are so few emotions anywhere in this novel, apart from those of self-regard and self-consciousness. The Pages may well be a novel that polarises its readers. Those who enjoy a philosophising, almost didactic tone will enjoy it; those who want flesh and blood, warmth and expansion will not.
The Pages
By Murray Bail (Text $40)
* Stephanie Johnson is an Auckland writer.
