by Murray BailPublished by Harvill Secker
~ Review in Halifax Herald, February 2009
It has been ten years since Eucalyptus, and once again Murray Bail brings us a novel of harsh, beautiful landscapes and the dry wit that is distinctively Australian. Wesley Antill is a self appointed philosopher, and is unable to pursue his calling on the vast sheep station in New South Wales where he lives with his brother and sister. He moves to London and then Germany, pursuing what he believes should be the life of the philosopher. Germany, he writes in his journal, has given the world ‘five of the giants of western philosophy. It must be something in the water.’
After many years, he returns home and sets up an office in an abandoned wool shed where ‘lines of silver light from the loose-fitting sheets of corrugated iron and the various nail holes ... intersected the brown stillness’. But he dies before his work is produced and his siblings look for an assessment of their brother’s output. There is excitement in the Philosophy Department at Sydney University and they send Erica to try and make sense of it all. She too sets herself up in the wool shed. ‘The air was thick with the smell of wool, so thick it surrounded and began caressing her. Erica felt if she stayed here for any length of time her skin would improve.’
The Pages follows Erica’s slowly unfolding friendship with Wesley’s sister, and an almost imperceptible romance with his brother. Their quiet life in an unforgiving landscape is juxtaposed with Wesley’s diaries of his life in Europe as he struggles to find the place to write. ‘Begin with nothing. Begin again. Not to think, but allow thinking to arrive. Drought-thoughts.’ And Bail keeps us waiting right to the end, the Antill writings forever a carrot dangling on the next page, which we keep compulsively turning.
Murray Bail was born in Adelaide. He is the author of several books, including Eucalyptus, which won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
