The Voyage by Murray Bail
Published by Text Publishing Company
Pp. 200
Murray Bail is a fan of the experimental novel. Some
may call it modernism; others stream-of-consciousness; still others pretentious
nonsense. The eponymous voyage is the journey taken by ship of Frank Delage on
his return from Vienna to Sydney. He travels to Old Europe to seduce the
musical community with his new piano, which has a radically clear sound, but he
fails to generate much interest. An appallingly bad salesman or promoter, he
blames others for his shortcomings even though he achieves an introduction to a
modern composer through a rich and influential couple (the Schallas). He falls
for the mother, Amalia, but returns to Sydney with the daughter, Elisabeth.
On the ship, Delage talks to the other passengers and
hears their stories, while reminiscing about his own experiences. These stories
overlap and interweave, often in the space of a sentence, as when he journeys from
the boat to the von Schalla drawing room in his thoughts which are mirrored in
the prose. “Wherever he looked there was another wave of different shape,
different size, lengths of dissolving foam drawing the eye, the pink sofa
obscenely dented with buttons he couldn't avoid, striped maroon armchairs by
the fireplace...” An absence of chapters, paragraphs that extend over several
pages, and constant switches in time can become wearisome.
The trip from the New World to the Old and back again
proves ultimately meaningless, as his influence is superficial and his piano
sinks without trace. “The ship continued pushing across the surface, a path of
creamy-white in its wake, which was almost immediately erased, leaving no sign –
an easy mockery of the ship’s mighty engines and propellers.” He believes he is
at a disadvantage in Vienna due to his piano being “nicotine brown” in the land
of tradition where all the other pianos are black. “It was like his cousins
from the sticks the year they’d gate-crashed a family wedding in Sydney,
wearing loud neckties.” He thinks he will,
“paint a scene of native
trees, eucalypts, on his piano which would rear up into a forest when the lid
was raised (notes flitting like birds through the smooth trunks?). If not to everybody’s
taste it would at least declare where it was manufactured, a graphic reminder
of the differences between his piano and the antiquated, established pianos, he
needed as much help as he could get, from anywhere.”
Delage imagines that the problem is with Vienna rather
than his piano and he wonders frequently why he didn't try Berlin instead. He
accuses Vienna of being stuffy and resistant to progress. “I don’t know what’s
the matter with the people in this place. Have their imaginations come to a
grinding halt? Fossilised.” It’s not that he prefers anywhere else: he is
equally scathing of Perth, “which has a history of visitors setting foot on the
place and immediately wanting to turn around, a reaction which continues to
this day” and Sydney, where he attacks the architecture of the iconic Opera
House; “an overrated piece of architecture, if ever there was, a sacred
building in Sydney, in all of Australia, based on a white handkerchief, in the
glare of daylight it shouts out ‘over-emphasis’, and therefore ‘provincial’,
anything to catch attention, softer, more complex, thoughtful at night, and the
acoustics are terrible.”
In fact, it is difficult to find anything that Delage
does like in this whingeing barrage of bitterness. Everything is linked in his
mind, which flits about with the attention span of a flea. “His life had been a
confusion, he found it difficult to express his views, let alone hold onto
them, information and adjustments came in from all directions.” He has an
opinion on everything, although it is rarely a positive one. From central
heating, which has caused to families to become dispersed, to diplomats – “Mediocre
people like nothing better than to work in embassies. Their most accomplished
skills are pouring cocktails and stamping passports” – he barely has a good
word to say about anyone or anything. He even criticises smiles, which are
insincere and “have no meaning”.
He dislikes cities – “There is always something wrong
with a city, your only hope is to choose one with the smallest number of faults”
– and the countryside equally. “The Australian countryside actively discouraged
walking of any kind, except as an endurance test, the example set by the early
explorers who mostly died of thirst or exhaustion, some were speared, the
difficulty being the heat, also the insects, the drooping khaki trees and
bushes hardly help.” The heat is harmful to his piano, “In hot countries, the
weather favours drums and single-string instruments, and their repetitious melancholy,
a grand piano would require tuning every other day”, although he reveals rare
pleasure in the cessation of rain, “which was a precise moment he always liked.
The many different kinds of grey, of black, patches of grey-black reflected,
laid out on and at angles to the streets, rectangles of it tilted and
glistened, glass had turned as dark as mirrors, mixed with what was rounded.”
The only conclusion to be drawn is that Bail fears he has
been treated unfairly by critics, as he reserves his strongest vitriol for this
profession. “Critics have an absurd sense of their own superiority... they
suffer from a constant psychological condition which constantly prompts them to
be critical – nothing can be done about it, a critic begins as a failure.” He
evidently thinks he is an expert novelist. He (or his central character; the
constant asides are inseparable from authorial intrusion) claims that modern
novels display a lack of invention and are “more and more an author’s reaction
to nearby events, a display of true feeling.” He tells the reader,
“We should not be
disapproving of repetition. Each day we see the same things, eyes, noses and
legs, the trees and clouds, and each day we repeat the same words. And we never
stop doing the same things over and over again, every day, sleeping, cleaning our
teeth, shaking hands, drinking tea, sitting on a chair, which give stability to
our lives. It is necessary.”
It may be necessary, but it isn't necessarily interesting.
With his interconnections, he sees music as an analogy for literature – exactly
what he accuses critics of doing. “All art, he said, including the playing of
pianos, was imperfect... As listeners, we actually want an imperfect result. It
is human, and therefore closer to human understanding. Otherwise, it is beyond understanding.”
Not so. I understand this; I just don’t like it.
