Murray Bail: Camouflage

By PENELOPE BIEDER*

This tiny book contains only two stories, but the wonderful images return and reverberate for days after.

The first story, Camouflage, is about a piano tuner, Eric Banerjee, who has suddenly found himself, at 40, not where he dreamed of being. With a heartbreaking poignancy Murray Bail's spare prose outlines lives not fully lived: "However hard he worked the world around him remained just out of reach. It was as if a steady invisible force held him in one spot, and now began pushing him back slightly and to one side."

The second story, The Seduction of My Sister, pays glorious homage to suburbia. A boy's younger sister is someone he barely notices, even though they are alone together for days on end. Their mother has a dreary job in Myers department store, working long hours. An empty section sits over the road, but the morning he wakes and see piles of sand and a cement-mixer there is the morning his life begins to change. The new people are "extroverts"; the house is unlike all the others on the street - "it caused our father to give a brief laugh of misunderstanding." It's the children who find a way around differences, especially when they meet Gordon Gill, the new people's son, about their age.e

This little book will whet the appetite for more of Bail's wonderful writing - as true and taut as a well-flung boomerang.

Text Publishing

$24.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.