Gerald Murnane’s novels are so strange, so far from literature’s beaten path, that their very existence – let alone their republication and celebration – seems miraculous. And they are celebrated: the 84-year-old Australian author is a regular favourite for the Nobel prize in literature, and this month sees the reissue of his fourth novel, Inland, first published in 1988 and in the view of JM Coetzee, Murnane’s “most ambitious, sustained and powerful piece of writing”.
After his early novels, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976) – idiosyncratic but broadly autobiographical stories of growing up – Murnane published The Plains (1982), a transitional work blending fiction with a philosophical style. Inland followed: his first mature work in the sense that it is recognisably from the same pen and the same mind as all his later fiction.
It is traditional in a book review to summarise or at least introduce the plot, but here there is no plot to speak of. There is, however, narrative direction, and an intimacy that comes from the narrator directly addressing the reader, both of which give Inland a surprisingly moreish quality. “It is easier for you than for me, reader. While you read you are sure of coming to the end of the pages. But while I write I cannot be sure of coming to the end.”
It reads like nonfiction, but the narrator is not Murnane. We know this because he opens the book by saying: “I am writing in the library of a manor-house, in a village I prefer not to name, near the town of Kunmadaras, in Szolnok County.” This places us in Hungary, and Murnane, we know – one of many eccentric trivialities that circle him – has never left Australia.
The story follows our man’s experience of writing the book, which when complete he will send to his editor in South Dakota. “I type slowly and carefully. I stare at the keyboard and I try to see in the air between my face and the keys the words I am about to type.” We follow his thoughts, his descriptions of the landscape outside his window and, later, his childhood, and in particular the memory of “the girl from Bendigo Street” – all in elegant, perfectly grammatical sentences.
Murnane has described his fiction as “no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of his mind”. This may seem blandly self-evident, but it is the quality of his descriptions and reflections on those contents that make his books so interesting; and it is a mistake to read them with a view to what they omit (plots, characters, issues) rather than what they include. The more of his work you read, the better it gets, as motifs – colours, glass marbles, horse racing – thicken in meaning. Nowhere else do we feel so strongly that a book is an invitation literally into another person’s mind.
Inland may be light on characters, but it is full of character and of Murnane’s vision of the world, and even his brand of rich austerity cannot resist some traditional novelistic pleasures, whether comic (“I have admired birds for as long as I can remember for their furtiveness”) or emotional. “I would have said I like her,” he writes of the girl from Bendigo Street. “But by now enough time has passed, I think, for me to use the bolder word. Today I write I love her.”
“A page of a book is not a window but a mirror,” we’re told, and the final thread of Inland is the narrator’s obsession with certain titles, particularly Wuthering Heights. It is a mark of either stunning self-confidence, or Murnane’s wry vision, that Inland ends with the closing lines of Brontë’s novel. He fixates on another line too, this one from French poet Paul Éluard: “There is another world but it is in this one.” Another world in this one: what finer description of a novel could there be?
• Inland by Gerald Murnane is published by And Other Stories (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
