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�They saw the world itself as one more in an endless series of plains.�

There is a basic human instinct to look for meaning in life, to open the door of reality in hopes to find of an elaborate clockwork beneath it all which we can investigate in an attempt at comprehension. This quest for meaning tends to be a journey trod through metaphysical landscapes more so than a shoulder to the wheel, making Art a valuable avenue for an abstract expedition into the heart of reality. If any of our art and philosophical probings have given us a finite answer to life’s greatest mysteries is up for debate, but it must be said that one of art’s greatest assets is the finding more and more beautiful ways to ask the questions. Gerald Murnane’s The Plains does just this by chronicling the journey of a filmmaker who has aims to look �for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances� as he travels deep into the plains of Australia. The plains, elusive �vistas of vistas� seem to endlessly flow into one another on an eternal path towards the center of Australia. While the story of this slim novel is simple—the unnamed narrator arrives in town with a fistfull of research to woo a patron into funding an aesthetic endeavour to unlock mysteries of the plains in new ways and his subsequent years there—there is a lush landscape of ideas as vast and mysterious as the plains themselves to explore. The novel is never bogged down by the philosophical meanderings and is eminently engaging and satisfying like water from the canteen of a desert traveler. The Plains is an extravagant and multi-interpretable toybox of ideas framed as a parable on the quest for meaning through art and all its aspects while our place in the world when it’s structure is viewed through the abstract, all of which is orchestrated through a brilliant prose style which marches far and wide like a heroine or hero on an epic journey.

�I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret�

There is a Spanish term, Vacilando, which doesn’t exactly translate into English but encompasses the idea of a trip made for the purpose of the journey and not the destination. The Plains is that sort of novel, concerning itself more with the attempts to reach a new understanding of the reality of the plains rather than a successful breakthrough and solution. Not much happens plot-wise beyond the lengthy and full of suspenseful screw turning scene of landowners sitting around �the labyrinths of saloon bar� to hear out the envisioned endeavours men have planned in order to analyze the life of the inner plains. The scene is gripping in the way one waits and waits and waits for weeks to hear word if their poem or story or what-have-you has been accepted or declined for publication. Much of the first act isn’t spent on pushing the ball of story forward but stepping back and world-building an elaborate history or artistic struggles and arguments that seem to play out in dramatic (and occasionally violent) action the way philosophical schools of thought would refute one another while simultaneously capturing their own ideas. What is eminently thrilling is the way artistic opinions are made large like sporting adversaries in a way that envisions art as a life-or-death-like matter of importance. It would seem the inner plainsman have a long history or interpretation of the plains around them and the horizon they can chase but never catch, and these varying interpretations are as polarizing as politics.

�How did I expect to find so easily what so many others had never found � a visible equivalent of the plains, as though they were mere surfaces reflecting sunlight?�
Flash forward to the present where the war of plains-interpretation is but settling dust. Now a new wave of visionaries wishes to interpret the plains anew. Murnane offers mostly comical but thought-provoking artistic voyages such as an orchestra with each instrument played quietly and at great enough spatial distance from the other instrument so that the listener must wander the room of musicians hearing only one instrument at a time—and hardly so—to �draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.� In fact, much of the novel focuses on impossibility and unattainability. We have art that reaches but cannot grasp, and aloof women the narrator can never reach, and even his film which has yet to begin filming ten years later. The process of attempts and thought formation are what matter, and it seems even the best laid plans often go awry or fail to fruition, because what is sought after will forever be beyond our reach like the horizon on the plains. We can never fulfill an answer, but only ask the question in evermore unique and breathtaking ways; the methods and awareness of a question to be asked that explores every deep and dark facet is the more fascinating story than the release of a climactic conclusion. It’s the sort of thing that puts a fire in our guts to go out and forge our own path. �[T]he man who travels,� theorizes one of the landowners, �begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey.� We must not fear failure and press on regardless, a hero/ine is made by their journey, without which they could never hope to achieve their crowning act.

�We’re disappearing through the dark hole of an eye that we’re not even aware of.�

While the use of art as an exploratory device beats loudest in the novel’s chest, it is just a muscle to bring to life the larger theme of the novel. �Every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote, private plain,� says the narrator. All of us are traveling inward, like the narrator across the seemingly endless Australian plains, seeking an understanding of ourself and the world around us. The plains, mentioned multiple times per page, are the chief object here, but what stand-in they serve in the novel’s parable is widely open to interpretation. This multiple interpretative quality of every aspect of the novel is its greatest glory, giving a meta-fictional flair as the meaning is as elusive as the the meaning behind the quest for meaning is in the book.

�All talk of a nation presupposed the existence of certain influential but rarely seen landscapes.�

The plains are often compared to mirrors, launching a gleefully cyclical thought pattern about how we reflect the world and how the world reflects us. There is much emphasis on how different the inner plains are than the outer plains, and an investigation if inner Australian constituted a vastly different community and ideology than general Australia. �The boundaries of true nations were fixed in the souls of men,� says the narrator, asking the reader to consider the abstract ideas that are borders, both physically and metaphysically. The struggle is not between inner Australia and outer Australia, but any individual or idea and the grand wide-sweeping scale of existence and transferable to any form of this scenario that the reader chooses to use as a basis of interpretation.

Murnane has an exquisite prose style that launches into a lengthy and healthy stroll through the linguistic countryside. �One of my greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction,� , �has been to discover the endlessly varying shapes that a sentence may take.� This leads us on a wonderful path full of philosophical sightseeing through the examinations on the varying shapes of reality. Within the world of The Plains, everything is pregnant with the potential for meaning like a clam nearly bursting open might or might not be so from a massive pearl inside. Yet, we may only be able to posit about the clam because, try as we might, the clam can never be opened. This is not cause for sadness or defeatism, but for joy as we can forever theorize and ponder what lies within. Art is a road paved in gold towards a destination of meaning that will forever be elusive but we can take endless comfort and satisfaction at the euphoric �vistas of vistas� we pass along the way.

4.5/5

�I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.�