There was a really good turnout for the last book group meeting of the year and we had a long talk about Gerald Murnane's The Plains. Everyone agreed that it was a very difficult book to read, we kept wondering when some sort of insight was going to be revealed or a point to the story was going to be disclosed. But there wasn't. I had this inkling that "the plains" and the ruminations upon them described so endlessly in the book weren't a metaphor for peoples' lives, that they just unfold in a featureless way until you look closely at their detail. When I thought of this it made me wonder if I should start reading it again to make sense of the story in a deeper way. But I didn't.
We wondered if it would be published today. There was no mention of the first people who inhabited the plains – the aborigines – but is that just a contemporary preoccupation? Or is it beside the point? Or women. There was just the sketchiest mention of the landowner's daughter or the woman in the library whom he had designs on but that seemed to be it.
The preface to the book was wonderful: beautiful lively writing that painted a picture of a work rich with meaning and skill, a picture that seemed so at odds with the book itself. My feelings about the book were so at odds with its description that I kept doubting I'd really understood it. The writing was very good but it just seemed that I'd missed something.
We managed to settle on our next book very early in the evening and with very little debate so we're reading The Sellout by Paul Beatty, a Booker prize winner which is a good recommendation (IMHO) right there. See you at the All Nations on Feb 6 next year!
