Gerald Murnane’s novels are so strange, so far from literature’s beaten path, that their very existence – let alone their republication and celebration – seems miraculous. And they are celebrated: the 84-year-old Australian author is a regular favourite for the Nobel prize in literature, and this month sees the reissue of his fourth novel, Inland, first published in 1988 and in the view of JM Coetzee, Murnane’s “most ambitious, sustained and powerful piece of writing”.
After his early novels, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976) – idiosyncratic but broadly autobiographical stories of growing up – Murnane published The Plains (1982), a transitional work blending fiction with a philosophical style. Inland followed: his first mature work in the sense that it is recognisably from the same pen and the same mind as all his later fiction.
