BARLEY PATCH

One of Australia’s leading writers looks at the unusual building blocks of his work.

This is a reissue of a book first released in 2009, and noteworthy, among other reasons, because it ended a hiatus of more than a decade in which Murnane “gave up writing fiction.” As the narrator of this “fiction”—he avoids the terms “novel” and “story”—explains, instead of writing, he would concern himself with pondering images, characters, landscapes, and feelings from his previous reading and writing that made a lasting impression. He might also “write intricate sentences made up of items other than words.” Fortunately, only words are used in this book, a strange kind of writer’s manifesto that tries to convey how the mind of this Australian fictionist works, or at least the mind of the narrator—a distinction Murnane struggles to maintain given the narrative’s many autobiographical details. The early pages deal at length with the lasting impressions he absorbed from reading Brat Farrar, one of the better works by an exceptional mystery writer named Josephine Tey. A similar discussion concerns impressive images from the comic strip Mandrake the Magician. Eventually, certain themes or motifs emerge that appear frequently in other Murnane works, such as colored glass in doors or windows, jockeys’ racing colors, horse racing in general, and the monthly illustrations of a wall calendar. Some images almost become mantras with their frequent repetition, such as a house with two storeys and a “grassy countryside” (each appears more than 40 times). There are compelling ideas here about the creative process, but the average reader may find it difficult to appreciate them amid the repetition, the painstaking diction, and the bemusing eccentricities of Murnane’s prose.

A peculiar kind of reluctant self-revelation that is both intriguing and frustrating.