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“I wondered whether all my investigations so far had been mere glances at the deceptive surfaces of plains.��
Holy moly, what was that? Anyone who thinks that with this book he/she is embarking on a literary exploration of the Australian interior (the writer's homeland) is going to be thoroughly deceived. You end up in a surrealistic story, with a storyteller fascinated by the unique character of the (Australian) interior and its inhabitants (for the sake of clarity, not the aborigines, clearly the white colonizers). In particular, the storyteller is a filmmaker who plans to shoot a groundbreaking film to uncover the true character of that interior once and for all.

So the story seems to start fairly straightforward, especially since our filmmaker overwhelms us with all kinds of precise details about his arrival - 20 years earlier - in a town deep in the interior. But instead of descriptions of the plains, the narrator mainly focuses on the endless discussions of the "plainsmen" when they try to express what distinguishes them from others. It turns out that these plainsmen are not ordinary people, but a motley collection of aristocratic landowners, artists, architects, archivists and so on, who are constantly at odds with each other and found their own movements, and sometimes even violent conflicts erupt. There’s an odd 19th century feel attached to this setting.

After a while, you realize that Murnane's plains is actually a fictional space, and for lack of a more prosaic image, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call that fictional space "reality". Here, Murnane masterfully plays with the different connected and opposite meanings of words like "the plains", "the interior" and "plain". In other words, he offers a pastiche of people's intense, but ultimately fruitless attempts to grasp the core reality around them, by unfolding a thousand possible imaginations. It's a typical postmodernist viewpoint.

Our filmmaker-storyteller endlessly zooms in on the different views on the "plains", in a rather high pitched intellectual style. He uses very sophisticated sentences that you often have to reread two or three times to understand just a little bit of what it is about, although the real meaning does not seem so important. Here’s a �� rather simple - example: “Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes �� one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily. �� It's the succession of lots of sentences like this one that also makes this story into a 'plains' of its own, where sense and meaning are lost in the endless variation of words.

Another feature: this thin book contains a striking number of scenes in which the narrator or others observe things from behind glass: the plains itself, or the wife of a landowner, who is reading in the library and in turn stares out through a glass window. Incumbent light (from the plains of course, but sometimes also simply the reflection on the wine glasses) is repeatedly cited as an important situation-element. Windows and glass here function as a kind of deforming membrane through which we necessarily have to look at things, but can never grasp them. With all this the importance of the momentary, the uniqueness of the moment of time and the hyper-subjective of each experience, of perception is emphasized, and therefore also the fleeting, intangible and unreachable nature of reality. Another postmodernist stance.

I can imagine that, reading this review, you get a slightly confused feeling. Well, that is exactly the experience you have as a reader of Murnane's booklet, both during the read and afterwards. You wonder what exactly it was you read and what its message was, and even after you finished it, you aren't sure. It is plainfully masterful how Murnane gets us out of balance in that way and confronts us with a reality that ultimately is unfathomable. I can understand that for a lot of people, this is a rather upsetting and unsatisfying reading experience, but it is a succinct one if you're open for it.
(rating 3.5 stars)