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I have read enough bad reviews of Barley Patch to realize a good book when I see it. The negatives relate mostly to readers who did not finish the book or give enough effort to discover the goodness in it. I would guess that many of them were being introduced to the writing of Murnane for the very first time. If an earlier Murnane title such as The Plains had already been read there is no possible way the reader would have quit on him just because he admitted to quitting the writing of fiction fifteen years prior to the writing of this book. There are amazing parts throughout but one must actually read the book in order to get to them. Murnane is a very serious writer who is interested in real people even in light of his writing fiction. His characters are not "made-up" in the sense of unrealistic, but instead have flaws that make them susceptible to appearing in his fiction regularly. The unblemished woman is far less interesting to Murnane than one sporting freckles or even liver spots if truth be told.

I understand that I am reading the Murnane oeuvre incorrectly as I began my personal introduction with The Plains and then continued on into this title. It has been strongly suggested that I read Murnane's work in the order in which it was written, but I kind of like breaking the rules just as much as Murnane apparently does as well. He repeats himself, and revisits characters often enough that some readers consider him a bore. I do not. I like his style and the words he chooses are exquisite in his story telling. He writes of things most readers might find dull, but I enjoy the art of discovery and this is what keeps occurring throughout his lively and engaging fiction.

There are numerous reviews of Gerald Murnane available that talk about the gist of his topics and style that there is little need for me to impress my grasp on his writing and what it means to be one of the few who find his work a loftier exercise than most readers can handle, even though it is a badge of honor for a person like me. It is the same reason I love to read a writer such as Thomas Bernhard as much as I do, and the same reason I believe I relate to a writer like Gilles Deleuze or even Samuel Beckett. Perhaps I read for all the wrong reasons, but I do think not. Gerald Murnane is certainly an elite member in the personal canon of my literary greats, though he is unconventional in today's version of plot, character, and dialogue as it pertains to great and lasting fiction. Murnane makes you work hard for your pleasure and that is rewarding in itself. You have to pay attention or get lost in a labyrinth of people, places, and things.

This is the type of book I love to read, and my willingness to now collect the entire Murnane oeuvre must trump the normal and customary reading habits of most people I might know or have been acquainted with. The only instance where I may have doubted my new religious obsession with Murnane was during "the man on the horse" segment. I felt Murnane then was grasping at straws in his fiction. A bit disjointed and out of sorts. I hoped that maybe the introduction of the "nun" into the text would provide a new understanding, and she did, of course, in due time. And that is another thing I notice when I read Murnane, it is mostly about time. And, of course, landscape. The "man on the horse" proved to be an instrumental part of the book as well as in his life as he was trying to reconstruct through fiction his own conception, though he admittedly failed in his endeavor but not without a courageous first try.

I mentioned in one of my reading progress updates that, "If David Shields had been the writer of this book, the author of this fiction, I would have thrown the book in the trash many pages ago, perhaps from the very beginning. But Gerald Murnane is somebody I want to know, to be intimate with. I trust him and I am willing to go wherever he wishes to take me. And that is good because he is going places I do not remember being, but certainly I must have been there." And I meant what I said. For example, as a frame of reference, I cannot stand a writer with the personality of a David Shields and I find writers like him quite revolting. They seem "made-up" and full of themselves. I do not find them at all interesting, at least nowhere near as interesting as David Shields would want me to believe he is. But Murnane is different. He can speak of the very same issues of love, lust, courting, and masturbation that Shields does and still he has me engaged in my reading and not at all cringing with the disgust that Shields erupts in me. Frankly, I find that Shields is a creep and Murnane is not. And Murnane is so much more than a retarded lover unversed in matters of women and sex, but he does talk about it enough that there is an underlying impact to his writing.

This book has been unfairly criticized by some. It is definitely worth the trouble to read it. It is actually a very enjoyable experience. Kind of like being a dues-paying member of my coffee club.

I read this book a long time ago when an old friend of mine gave it to me and told me that it is good. She also told me that she had won it in a competition and she was able to chose the prize that she had won so she selected this book because the author had the same name as her (though it was spelt differently). The funny thing is that she has gone on to write sequels to this book, and all I can say was that I did not find this book all that engrossing, even though it was a science-fiction book and I read it during the days I read lots of science-fiction/fantasy. Hey, looking through the list of editions of this book, it has even appeared in the penguin orange cover edition, which suggests that it is a classic (which I must say it is not).

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world and centres around a woman who has developed psychic powers, but because she is different, she is feared by the so-called normal people and people like her are hunted down and killed. As such she has to keep her powers hidden, though I believe that she also goes on a quest, at the end of which she discovers a cache of nuclear weapons, and comes to the conclusion that it is her goal in life to use her powers to prevent people from using these weapons again and causing the devastation that other people did.

 

It still baffles me as to why this book has been reprinted in the Penguin orange cover edition because, seriously, the story sounds so much like The Chrysalids (though the ending does not involve nuclear weapons) and the Chrysalids (which has also been reprinted in a Penguin orange cover edition) is so much better and so much more engrossing. Okay, it has been a long time since I have read this book, but still, from what I can remember, I did not think all that much of it, and even though it was fantasy/science-fiction, I still didn't like it.

 

John Birmingham wrote so much better when he was writing gonzo journalism rather than the sci-fi books that he seems to have written of late, but then again he seems to sell books, and the books that he did write early on pretty much set him up to the point where he could pretty much write what he wanted to, so I guess more power to him. Anyway, while I do not know what the experience of share housing is in England (and I understand that there is a lot of it there), the feel of this book is that it is distinctly Australian, and having been in a number of sharehouses myself I can seriously relate to what he is describing here (though I must admit he has probably embellished the stories somewhat, but then again why let the truth get in the way of a good yarn?).

 

 

I guess I should do what others have done when commenting on this book, and that is talk about some of my sharehousing experiences, and I must admit that I have had a lot. The average time that I have spent in a sharehouse is usually about six months, though there have been a couple where I have lasted about two years (though one of them had a somewhat itinerant population) and the shortest would probably have been about two weeks. Okay, I guess one may need to define the idea of a sharehouse as being one where you are sharing with more than one other person, though sometimes the actually definition of a person living in a house can be rather dubious. One house we had was originally intended for two of us, but as soon as my housemate picked up a girl (he always had to have a girlfriend) she immediately moved in, and then another guy decided to camp in the lounge, and within two days he had brought another friend around as well. Mind you, this particular house lasted two weeks before the police kicked in the door and arrested the lot of us.

 

 

Then there were the Findon Flats, a collection of about two hundred flats were while there were only two of us living in the flat, the entire place was like one community: there were always people coming and going. Mind you one of my friends was a small time drug dealer, so that is probably why there were always people coming and going. One of the cool things about living there was that people would come in, hang for about half-an-hour, smoke some weed, and then leave. However, the problem with living with drug dealers is that once somebody hooks onto you as a drug dealer they suddenly become frequent visitors. Oh, and the fact that your flat also becomes a target for thieves seems to outweigh the benefit of getting free drugs.

 

 

I also lived in what is pretty much termed as a party house. It was a large, two story, six bedroom house in one of the wealthier parts of Adelaide with a pool and a spa. The problem with the spa was that it always broke down. However, we actually had ten people squeezed into that house at one time, which made using the rather small kitchen an absolute pain. However that house brings back lots of memories, including the parties (which wouldn't be a party unless the cops rocked up at least once, and usually multiple times). I still remember the time that my mate and I decided to cook some pasta using dope butter, and suddenly having the sensation of being stoned hit us so hard that we were literally flat on our back for hours.

 

 

That house came to an end because the landlord simply could not get anybody into the house, and I was too much of a stoner (read lazy and paranoid) to actually attempt to get others to move into the place. We did finish my time in that house with the mother all all parties which only came to an end when my friend almost killed himself by flaking out on a concrete step. That friendship circle also came to an end pretty quickly also since the mother of all hangovers literally turned us all against each other.

 

Hey, I'm still sharehousing, this time in Melbourne, and I do desire to try to keep the tradition of it by not staying in the house for too long. Okay, now that I am 700 km away from my parents, I do not have the luxury of running back to their house when things go wrong, and moving can be a pain. At least I have learnt from my mistakes and can at least prepare myself to consider moving on before things get too bad. However, the problem is that I have found a good church within walking distance, though nothing is ever that permanent, and since Paul the Apostle never really set his roots down anywhere for too long, I don't think I need to either.

To be honest with you I thought this novel was little more than a load of existentialist rubbish. I have only read two of Malouf's novels, this one and the one about Ovid being exiled to the edge of the Roman Empire. It seems as if there is something in common with these two novels. Ovid is exiled from the centre to the fringe while here, in this novel, the main characters go from the fringe (being Queensland in Australia) to the centre (being the trenches in France during World War I). However I have no real intention of making any big deals about that because I really do not want to make a big deal about this book. Maybe it had something to do with my English teacher praising this novel as one of the greatest pieces of Australian literature ever written, and me just thinking that his tastes and my tastes differed so sharply that when he would begin praising a novel, I would begin hating it.

 

Look, I might be being a bit too harsh on Malouf, but after having to sit through A Street Car Named Desire, A Glass Menagerie, and Henrik Ibsen in year 12 English I had come to a point that I would pretty much hate anything that my English teacher loved, and this book was one of them (as was Gallipoli, which he was using as a contrast to this book since both of them involve the main characters getting slaughtered in the trenches of World War One). I do remember making a comment about how at the end of the book the main character, after being blown apart (I think) and going into a afterlife where he is forever digging into the ground in an attempt to return to Australia, was in hell, my teacher objected and asked 'how is he in hell? What did he do wrong?'. Well, if forever digging in the ground attempting to get to a place you will never reach is not hell, then what is? Seriously dude, there is a Greek myth in which some guy is forever pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again before it reached the top. That guy (I can't remember his name off hand) was in hell, and if he was in hell, so is Malouf's main character, even if Malouf never intended it to be that way.

 

I think the problem with modern literature is that people either write books purely for entertainment, or they write it in a vain attempt to win some wonderful prize (of have Oprah recommend the book on her show ala Deep End of the Ocean) and become some wonderful literary author that everybody wants to imitate. Sorry to burst your bubble, but so are all the other million of wanna be authors out there. I think Jim Butcher had it right when he said that writing was bloody hard work and if you want to succeed then you have to be bloody persistent. You either write because you love to write (as I do) or you go and do something real with your life. Seriously, writing is like acting, millions think that it is an easy way to make heaps of money but guess what, it isn't. Hey, at least writing gives you more transferable skills than acting (or playing football).

 

As for writing literature, you don't set out to do it, it just happens. I doubt Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Anton Chekhov, or even Shakespeare, ever set out to write a classic. No, they wrote because they either loved writing or had something that they wanted to say, and it just happened that history judged their works to be worthy of being called a classic. As far as I am concerned, your book or story is not a classic unless it survives a hundred years, and is still imprint, or, even better, manages to survive a dark age (such as The Odyssey). I once read about a writer who had finished writing a book and screamed out that he had just written a work of literature, and proceeded to throw it into the fire (writers can be a very strange lot, especially the good ones; Emily Dickinson locked herself in her room and had no contact whatsoever with the outside world).

 

As for writing a book with meaning, look, either say it (as Dostoyevsky did) or don't - don't try to cloud it with imagery when it is not necessary to do so. Don't get me wrong, I love allegory, but the reason that Jonathon Swift wrote in allegory was because if he didn't he was likely to be dragged out of his house by British soldiers, tied to a stake, and executed for sedition (okay, I am probably going overboard a bit, but you can probably understand what I am getting at). George Orwell wrote allegory, and his allegory worked really well, namely because it would have multiple layers of meaning. Animal Farm for instance appears to be about Soviet Russia when in reality it could really be about dear old England (similar in that 1984 could actually be about what it was like in 1948, the year the novel was publish). As for C.S. Lewis, he wanted to portray the Christian message to an audience (children) who probably could not grasp what is essentially an adult concept (not that children do not understand Bible stories, but I remember as a kid in Sunday School that I never understood the nature of Christ's sacrificial death). Finally I want to mention Tolkien. He wrote a fantasy novel, and a pretty damn good one as well. However, when people started carrying on about how it is an analogy of how industrialisation is destroying the world his response was 'what? I hate allegory. Lord of the Rings is not allegory, it is a fantasy novel.'

 

I mentioned this play briefly in my commentary of Aristophanes' The Wasps and thought that I might continue the idea of the generation gap here. Now it has been a very long time since I have read this play (back in Year 12 English), and personally I really did not like it because its basic plot was a conflict between a father and his son. In the end there was never really any reconciliation between the two. It reminded me a bit of some of the other plays of the mid-twentieth century (such as those by Tennessee Williams) which are dull, depressing, and not really all that uplifting. Okay, many of Shakespeare's plays are similar, but I seem to find that there is a lot more life in some of these older plays than what I see in many of the more modern presentations.

 

The play is all about Anzac Day, an important day in the Australian psyche, and shows how two different generations respond to it. To the older generations it is a day to renuite with old war buddies and to remember the hardships and trials of war and to celebrate the victory that managed to pull them through. To the younger generation, who have never known war, and when they did, considered the war is be unjust and wrong, it was little more than a drunken free for all. In a way it shows the two different view points in that the older generation had to fight and die for their freedom and the freedom of their families, while the younger generation, having grown up in 'Peace Time', take it all foregranted.

 

As a little bit of a background, Anzac Day was the day that the allied forces landed at and attempted to take the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915 so that they could secure a way for the Russians to bring their Black Sea fleet into the Mediterranean. To say that it was an unmitigated disaster is an understatement (and saying that hopefully gives those of you unfamiliar with Australian history an idea of the mistake that was made in the operation). The leader of the operation was none other than Winston Churchill, and the disaster of Gallipoli almost brought his political career to an end (he was sidelined for the rest of World War I).

 

Things are much different now because the younger generation in this play are now all grandparents, and we are now in the third generation who have not known the horrors of total war. While wars were fought and continue to be fought around the fringes of the Anglo-American Empire, there was not been a need for a complete mobilisation of the population that was required in the two world wars. The fringe wars are being fought by professional soldiers, and as we move on even these soldiers are being taken from the battlefield to be replaced with drones. In many cases killing from a distance has become the norm, and thus our modern soldiers are engaged in little more than police actions and tactical strikes. The last war, that in Iraq, saw the complete collapse of the opposing army within about two weeks, only to be replaced by a long drawn out insurgency.

 

Even with other nations, such as the Russian Invasion of Georgia in 2008, involved only professional troops, though that was more on the Russian side than the Georgian. Even then the Georgian army pretty much collapsed, though this simply resulted in two pro-Russian territories declaring independence. Many of the other wars that have been fought have been little more than civil wars and national rebellions which have only called for the use of professional troops. However that does not necessarily mean that total war is not on the horizon, and that the great-grandchildren of those who fought in World War II will not be required sometime in the not to distant future to take up arms against a common enemy.