AustLit

The role of grasslands in Gerald Murnane’s fiction is as sustained and pronounced as his self-stated aversion to the coast and the ocean,² and his uneasy forbearance of mountain ranges. Murnane’s narrative devotion to steppe-like ecologies provokes the question of style and how his narrative strategies might operate dialectically with his chosen geography. When thinking of how geography inflects prose style one might think of “oceanic” or “thalassan” style in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, or John Banville’s The Sea , or even the sea of sand in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Alternately, the mountainous topography in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian mediates allegory and symbolism with the rhetoric of geographical representation. Absent such symbolic inducements, the steppe, plain, grassland – unvaried topography neither desert nor littoral, neither urban nor rural, yet a strangely replenishing source for agriculture, husbandry, and the history of human migrations – provide Murnane’s fictions with a distinct ground from which to produce his complex narrative meditations.' (Introduction)