AustLit

'A rare task more difficult than reviewing a book by Gerald Murnane, might be reviewing a critical account encompassing most of Murnane’s oeuvre. Not that I subscribe to the regularly expressed view that Murnane is ‘difficult.’ Indeed, overall, his novels—while being admittedly daunting when encountered for the first time—are quite straightforward once the reader finds the measure of the writer’s style, tenor and range. But reviewers and critics have often struck trouble in trying to fulfil their role of describing the key elements of Murnane’s fiction to unfamiliar readers. This is because there is an undeniable intricacy to his fiction, which demands to be addressed, and in so far as possible explained or described. That ‘intricacy’ is present in the stylistic surface of Murnane’s conspicuously polished prose; in the constant flux between his fictional bedrock and the metafictional superstructure; and in the substantive content provided by his tangled thematic and imagistic obsessions. Indeed, it is the remarkable degree to which style, method and substance are interwoven that occasionally results in Murnane’s fiction perplexing even his most dedicated readers. As Brendan McNamee concedes at one point in Grounded Visionary, there is a notoriously challenging section of Murnane’s Inland that leaves him lamenting, ‘The point of which, if there is any, escapes me entirely’ (92).' 

(Introduction)