With The Plains, however, Murnane more or less abandons realism altogether to move in the direction of something best described by his own term of fable. What elements of fantasy are present are employed crudely, for example with the protagonist driving in Florida with Jayne, Marilyn, and Susan -whose identities can easily be guessed. More specifically it concerns masturbation and, Portnoy's Complaint not withstanding, there has probably never been any other novel which examines, explores, concerns itself with the subject so relentlessly and in such detail. It suffers, despite the witty treatment of its material from the fact that the material is very familiar, in Australia at least -the tormented nature of adolescent sexuality for Catholic-educated youths. Murnane's second novel A Lifetime on Clouds remains more or less in the realm of realism. Already, though, there are signs of the direction which Murnane's fiction will eventually lead -in the constant references to maps and calendars, in the boy's substitution for the dull reality of numbers and figures images of his own devising and in the beginnings of the hypnotic absorption in his own imaginative processes. The boy inherits his father's love of gambling but converts it into an activity of the imagination. His father is a compulsive gambler and the family live in perpetual poverty. Clement Killeaton lives in the town of Bassett. Gerald Murnane began as a writer of confessedly autobiographical fiction of a talented but fairly conventional kind, but developed eventually into a writer who has been variously classified as postmodernist or fabulist and who has been described hyperbolically by at least one Australian critic as 'the most original writer this country has produced.' Tamarisk Row, for instance, is a comparatively familiar story of growing up Catholic in the Australian countryside. Gerald Murnane edited by John Hanrahan, Footscrag, Victoria, Footscrag Foundation for Australian Studies, 1987 Gerald Murnane by Imre Salusinszky, Melbourne and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.* * * Carlton, Victoria, Meanjin, 1990.* Critical Studies: OtherĮditor, with Jenny Lee and Phillip Mead, Temperament of Generations: Fifty Years of Writing in Meanjin. Ringwood, Victoria, McPhee Gribble, 1990. Ringwood, Victoria, McPhee Gribble, 1995.

Richmond, Victoria, Heinemann, 1988 London, Faber, 1989.Įmerald Blue. Carlton, Victoria, Norstrilia Press, 1985. Carlton, Victoria, Norstrilia Press, 1982 London, Penguin, 1984 New York, Braziller, 1985.

Melbourne, Heinemann, 1974.Ī Lifetime on Clouds. Address: 2 Falcon Street, Macleod, Victoria 3085, Australia. Career: Currently lecturer in creative writing, Victoria College, Melbourne. Education: The University of Melbourne, B.A.

The Plains by Gerald Murnane