By Alison McCulloch
Published: August 22, 2010, The New York Times
THE PAGES
By Murray Bail
196 pp. Other Press. Paper, US$14.95
Do geography and climate influence philosophy? Are cold and dark places more conducive to thinking than hot, barren and bright ones? Is it true, as one character in Murray Bail’s new novel, “The Pages,” puts it, that “too much light is fatal for philosophical thought?” And where does all that leave Australia?
In this, his fourth novel, Bail wonders about the philosophical shortcomings of his homeland, and frets that a paucity of philosophers may have left Australia open to too much psychology and “its vinelike offshoot, psychoanalysis.” “What is going on here? The skies are blue, forever cloudless — is that it? A great emptiness sending people back to themselves.”
“The Pages” is, among other things, an exploration of these different ways of thinking, a kind of contest between the philosophical and the psychological. The combat is represented at the outset by two middle-aged women, one a philosopher and the other, naturally, a psychoanalyst, and the story opens as the pair are headed out of Sydney on a road trip to a sheep station several hundred miles to the west. Erica, the philosopher, has been given the job of appraising the work of a reclusive unknown who, after years of globe-trotting, returned home to the farm to serve out his days writing some kind of philosophical work — perhaps a theory of emotions, or the story of his life, or both, or neither. Whatever it is, there are pages and pages and pages of it, left stacked where he worked in an old woolshed made of unpainted corrugated iron.
Erica is in her mid-40s, a calm, practical wearer of faded cardigans, slacks and no lipstick, who is trying to make sense of her life, and worrying that philosophy has made her sharp and coldhearted. “Can a woman be strong and clear without turning hard?” she wonders. Her friend and traveling companion, Sophie, is a few years younger, and Erica’s antithesis. Favoring the flashier — Italian ankle boots, crimson scarves, jangling gold jewelry — she is restless, easily thrown off balance and preoccupied with the recent end of an affair.
Whether or not geography influences philosophy, it certainly has an effect on Erica and Sophie, the “city women” as Bail calls them. For Erica, “a few days in such a place of unimaginable stillness could produce disorder, uncertainty, impatience, difficulties with herself and those around her.” To Sophie, meanwhile, “the large paddocks represented a mind emptied of variety, of life itself.” She fusses about her father and her ex-boyfriend, and spends too much time in the company of her cellphone.
Full review at NYT.
Footnote:
Published by Text Publishing in Australia.
shortlisted, Miles Franklin Literary Award
shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards
shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
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