‘Must I write?’

Eighteen years ago, Gerald Murnane gave up writing fiction. At least, that is what the unnamed narrator of Barley Patch says happened to him in this new work of fiction, the first to be published by Murnane in fourteen years. It is tempting to think that this book might offer some kind of insight into what led to this hiatus in Murnane’s career. After all, if Murnane is Australia’s most innovative writer of fiction, as the book’s blurb tells us, this period of silence is an absence that should interest careful readers.

Barley Patch, however, is just that, a work of fiction, according to its unnamed narrator. The reader frequently encounters sentences in it which ‘remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction’. It also shares its themes with much of Murnane’s oeuvre: a preoccupation with landscape and a fascination with aesthetic experience, and the various epistemological questions associated with fiction and representation; some characters (or personages, as the narrator would have it), appear to recur, or are at the very least similar to those from earlier works such as Tamarisk Row (1974) or The Plains (1982); the narrator’s curiosity about sex as a child and as a young adult; and so on. In fact, the world of Barley Patch is unsettlingly familiar to any reader with some knowledge of Murnane’s work and life. I say ‘unsettling’ because it appears nearly congruent with much of what we think we know about Murnane from the books and from biographical details we have come across over the years, such as his reluctance to travel, his fascination with jockeys’ colours and horse racing, and the hoarding of all his writings.