‘No thing in the world is one thing’, he declares ‘some places are many more than one place.’ These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs – fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green – and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.įirst published in 1988, Inland is republished here with a foreword written for this edition by the author. Look closer, though, and it's a haunting nineteenth-century novel of colonial violence captured inside the machine's test-pattern image-a distant, unassuming house on the plains.Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator’s imagination – from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator’s own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. 'Known for its sharp yet defamiliarizing take on the landscape and an aesthetic of purity historically associated with it, The Plains is uniformly described as a masterpiece of Australian literature. 'Murnane touches on foibles and philosophy, plays with the makings of a fable or allegory, and all the while toys with tone, moving easily from earnest to deadpan to lightly ironic, a meld of Buster Keaton, the Kafka of the short stories, and Swift in A Modest Proposal.A provocative, delightful, diverting must-reread.' STARRED Review, Kirkus Reviews ' The Plains has that peculiar singularity that can make literature great.' Ed Wright, Australian, Best Books of 2015 In the depths and surfaces of this extraordinary fable you will see your inner self eerily reflected again and again.' Sydney Morning Herald a piece of imaginative writing so remarkably sustained that it is a subject for meditation rather than a mere reading. 'A distinguished, distinctive, unforgettable novel.' Shirley Hazzard In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by ten other works of fiction, including The Plains and most recently Border Districts. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939.
This handsome new hardback edition is introduced by Ben Lerner, author of the internationally acclaimed novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, and a work of criticism, The Hatred of Poetry. This is the story of the families of the plains-obsessed with their land and history, their culture and mythology-and of the man who ventured into their world.įirst published in 1982, The Plains is a mesmerising work of startling originality.
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