The temptation with Murnane is always to corner him with words like 'autobiography' or 'metafiction', not just because of the echoes of his lived specifics within his unnamed first-person narrators, but because of the intentionally limited existence he infamously cultivates. If he, as he has (jokingly or not) insisted before, sits around watching horse-racing and/or reading Proust all day, if indeed he has done this confined entirely to a self-imposed technological (he refuses all aspects of 21st century industry, sans a phone through which to text relatives) and spiritual (he has spent all eighty-six of his years exclusively in the Australian state of Victoria) exile, AND >80% of his books star lonely and/or isolated Australian writers, how can they be anything but straightforward streams of consciousness? My answer is simple: sometimes you're just that good.

The Plains offers itself up to so many different angles of consideration in such a brisk pagecount that it spent months cooking in the chambers of my dusty grey matter before I even realised how effected I was by it, how ecstatically I'd adored the language, how ferociously I'd found myself reading and re-reading favourite passages, how many had won that vaunted slot, or how desperately I wished to locate anything like it, as quickly as possible.

In the meagre press it originally received, reviews focused on its surface satire. Fortunately, Murnane is sturdy enough to survive that. The Plains is wonderful as a bone-dry send-up of the impossibility of getting published within the dead zone of modern Australia, finding unique angles on a land of fields and sand whose millennia-old culture is some combination of ignored and stamped out by the hundreds of years of brutal colonial rule. Out with the old and no new to speak of; it's ruthless if you need it to be. Interpretations eventually deepened into a more philosophical understanding of the impossibility of making the meaning you intuit in the world into a coherent object, an existence not just futile but beautifully static. What does it mean to 'make'? Who do you make for, and how do you make 'for' them? What does a life spent doing so look like? Is it satisfying, or, indeed, anything at all? Need it be? Is the simple fact of being enough? When I read it, though, I could see nothing but the country the plains so desperately asserted they were not. A literary representation of Australia, much the same culturally and geographically, a series of carefully orchestrated outside fringes, with the successful appearance of an interiority a wall disguising the hollowed-out inner. I can't help but wonder what this means to him, a man who, despite his relative obscurity, has so delicately and knowingly designed his reputation as a hermit-genius. Perhaps he sees all, even him, as outside bluster, the inner a brush we only pretend to paint with, the world he draws us as real as the one he sits within. Whatever the case may be, I can't help but be touched by the naked hope found in a world so empty: