Farce and philosophy collide in 'The Pages,' Murray Bail's latest novel

'The Pages'

by Murray Bail

Other Press, 196 pp., $14.95

Subtle, playful, cerebral and strange, Murray Bail's novels are among the headiest treats in Australian fiction.

From the most unlikely premises — an endless package tour around the globe in "Homesickness," a tree-identifying contest/courtship in "Eucalyptus" — Bail constructs caprice-prone worlds that are quintessentially Australian.

"The Pages," his fourth novel (in bookstores Tuesday), is another offbeat blend of human comedy, maverick prose and quirky observation. The book is propelled by comparisons and contrasts — philosophy versus psychology, country manners versus urban sensibilities, etc. — as it tries to get to the truth behind the recently deceased Wesley Antill, who may or may not have been Australia's first world-class thinker.

As the book opens, philosophy professor Erica Hazelhurst is on her way to peruse Wesley's papers — the "pages" of the title — to see if they merit publication. This involves a road trip to the sheep station run by Wesley's surviving siblings, sister Lindsey and brother Roger, where Wesley spent years writing his supposed masterpiece. While supportive of his efforts, Lindsey and Roger were both bewildered by Wesley's philosophical bent. As Roger notes, "There's no other sign of it in the family."

Erica makes the mistake of bringing along her flighty friend Sophie Perloff, a gabby and inquisitive psychiatrist recovering from her latest affair with a married man. Sophie's restless presence is in sharp contrast not just to Erica but to Lindsey and Roger, and Bail teases some first-class farce from her fish-out-of-water status.

At the same time, as Erica looks through Wesley's writings, Bail gives us direct glimpses of Wesley himself, focusing on the years he spent in Europe absorbing and discarding various schools of philosophy as he tried to formulate one of his own. It soon becomes apparent Wesley didn't take nearly as much care with his personal life as he did with his studies — and perhaps he should have.

As finely constructed as "The Pages" is, you don't read Bail just for the plot.

Whether he's arguing that Australia's warm climate has left "an entire people without the benefit of long sentences" or pondering whether it's really possible to "wear" perfume, Bail casts fresh light on how strangely thought and language move through the mind, once you stop to examine them.

There's a marked visionary streak to his work, and he respects the mystery of personality, too, writing of Wesley: "Aspects of his character he preferred to keep to himself, without always knowing what they really were."

Although he gently ribs Wesley's philosophical ambitions, it's clear Bail is a skeptic when it comes to most schools of psychology.

"In Sydney," he laments in one of his frequent authorial interjections, "parents have been sending their own children, not yet in their teens, into psychoanalysis — ironing out the unformed mind before the unevenness of everyday life could give proportion or self-correction."

Bail's own inclination?

To spend time, as his inquisitive hero does, "squatting down to examine the very small and ordinary."