The reissue of Australian author Gerald Murnane’s fiction is introducing new readers to this most idiosyncratic and formally adventurous of novelists, now in his 80s. Postmodernism is at a nadir, but Murnane’s nested, self-reflexive narratives may be placed alongside the fabulations of Nabokov, Calvino and Borges, once grouped under that label. Murnane is known for not straying far from Goroke in Victoria – he is the anti-type of globe-trotting literary celebrity – but like those writers, and some of the modernists before them, he is a dreamer of other worlds. His work uncompromisingly blurs the frontiers of memory and imagination; it is not for the faint-hearted.
Inland, originally published in 1988, was the last novel Murnane wrote before a mysterious creative hiatus. The reader of other republished novels, such as Tamarisk Row (1974) or Border Districts (2017), now finds an important missing link. Inland is a novel that, in even more absolute terms than these books, disrupts realist conventions about setting and sense of place. Murnane is a fastidious exponent of the prose sentence, which he often treats as a report of a remembered image. From the interconnected pattern of these image-sentences we gradually infer not a place out there, but the landscapes of a solitary mind.
As with The Plains (1982), a novel that distinguishes the continental interior from the coastal rim of another place named “Australia”, we are again looking inwards. The narrator of Inland tells us that he is writing in “heavy-hearted” Magyar from the library of a manor house in the Hungarian steppes to an editor and translator in South Dakota. His intended reader edits a journal called Hinterland produced by an institute devoted to the study of prairies. She must, then, have translated these words into English. We are attuned to questions of transmission and reception throughout the novel, and never allowed to forget that an act of writing becomes an act of reading. A few years after writing Inland, Murnane went to the trouble of learning Hungarian: this commitment to a language in Europe that is not Indo-European suggests a sensibility attracted by the idea of a solitary language.
However, the narrator admits to practising a deliberate deception on the reader. The earlier imaginings of the Great Hungarian Plain and the midwest prairie are gradually supplanted by memories of a childhood spent moving around Melbourne and its hinterland. The narrator turns his back on the “idiot-sea”, which is apparently suited to poets rather than novelists. To be inland is to live in a dream-country: all these flatlands fuse so that the multiple selves of man and boy “will end in the one grassland”. Murnane has written that a thing exists for him only if he can see it in his mind – hence, JM Coetzee’s description of him as a radical idealist.
The voice of the “I” emerges with great affective power as that of the man who remembers his 12-year-old self and his love for the girl he left behind. He finally offers up these pages to his first reader. Inland is a love letter that looks out, looks within and looks back to “that other world which is in this one” (as Paul Éluard put it). When the narrator writes “I saw”, he is not limited to perceiving an object or remembering an image; nor even to remembering himself once remembering or seeing himself once seeing. In Greek, the verb to see is idein. Murnane is constantly thinking and seeing in idealities: things that exist only as creations of the imagination.
This crucially includes the books that he sees – their words, pages, spines and the superimposable images they invoke. Some of those pages are from Wuthering Heights: just as Cathy clutches Lockwood in his dream, so the older man is grasped by the memory of the “girl-woman” on the other side of the window. Murnane reveres Proust, for whom the transcendent regaining of time, or at least the illusion of it, is the apprehension of something “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”. It is characteristic of Murnane that he scoured a map to find a real township in South Dakota named Ideal. This is one among many placenames that are geographic nodes in a personal – not to say, solipsistic – network of signs.
Inland alludes to André Maurois’s biography of Proust, whose final lines exalt writing that allows the reader to “breathe with ecstasy through the curtain of the falling rain the scent of invisible yet enduring lilacs”. As with Proust, Murnane’s dream is constituted by his days of reading – and writing. Heartsickness is counterbalanced by the potential redemption of an ideal art that preserves the beloved and annihilates the self. In Inland the narrator goes so far as to write that “she is alive, I am dead”.
• Inland by Gerald Murnane is published by And Other Stories (£14.99) in the UK and Giramondo ($26.95) in Australia. To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
