It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. It was quite funny at times, in a satirical way, as culture, philosophy, religion and love of nature were exposed and extolled in the same breath.

The first part read like a parody of serious literature. Here was the kind of Australian writer I’d never dreamed of encountering, yet none of his books had received a major literary award. Over the following weeks and months Murnane’s other novels and collections of fiction – most of which were out of print and difficult to find at the time – revealed to me a local writer who could be mentioned in the same breath as literary greats (and eccentrics) like Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. I noticed the obvious things first: his sentences, above all else, were pristine his tone was direct his narrative control was stupefying and he seemed to be writing about something that was at once totally unique to him and recognisably Australian. Let’s try Shannon Burns’ 2015 article in the Sydney Review of Books, Gerald Murnane: An idiot in the Greek Sense: However, to really pin down the elusive, yet elaborate nature of this story will take a much better writer and thinker than moi! This brings us a little closer, thanks to the use of words like ‘distinctive’, ‘minute detail’, ‘haunting’ and ‘mirage’. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, ‘a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself‘. Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains. In a private library he begins to take notes for a film, and chooses the daughter of his patron for a leading role.

A young film-maker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his own contribution to the elaboration of this history. Obsessed with their own habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land. On their vast estates, the landowning families of the plains have preserved a rich and distinctive culture. Goodreads goes a little further with their synopsis, Okay, The Plains is that – on the very tip of the surface – but how to adequately describe the layers and depth? Gerald Murnane’s The Plains tells the story of the families of the plains – obsessed with their land and history, their culture and mythology – and of the man who ventured into their world. The blurb on the back of my Text Classic says, How do you sum up or explain your experience with a book that pushes, exposes and plays around with so many ideas in one compact little piece of speculative writing? Where do you even begin to describe just how profound an effect it has had on you? And how delighted to have a discovered a new-to-me writer with at least another nine books to dive into?

The Plains by Gerald Murnane