Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999 ISBN 1875847944
I have reviewed other works by Murray Bail on this site, and I have always found his books worth reading, even when they are flawed. As a novelist, Bail has followed his own path, and is not afraid to be obscure if he feels he needs to be. I'm sure that the success of Eucalyptus came as a surprise to him, given his relative lack of it before (and, perhaps, since). It was without doubt the best book of the year in Australia in 1999, winning both the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize.
I read it at the time and enjoyed it immensely; re-reading it has not diminished that pleasure much. The beauty of the book is its simple timelessness. A beautiful woman is held captive in a remote place. To win her hand, a suitor must complete a herculean task: this story is combined with echoes of Scheherazade's story-telling gift, romance, and a happy ending...what's not to like?
Bail's Australian twist on the classic plot-line makes the book quirky, and different in a likeable Australian way. Ellen, a beautiful woman, lives with her father near a country town in central New South Wales. Her father has planted on his property an example of every known species of Eucalyptus. He decides that he will give the hand of Ellen to the man that can successfully name each species.
As the suitors come and go, Ellen encounters a mysterious man wandering the property, who seems to magically appear, tell a story, and then just as magically disappear again. Each story seems to have some sort of connexion to the tree that they are standing under at the time. Meanwhile, Mr. Cave is inexorably naming the trees on the property, each day coming closer to claiming Ellen.
The tension Bail creates in this plot is heightened by the stories of the stranger, which invariably deal with lost love - or more particularly - lost moments: when people let love pass them by, or cast it aside. Each story that the stranger tells brings him closer to Ellen's heart. Bail intertwines the plot with vignettes about the trees themselves - the many facets of the mighty Eucalyptus family.
Bail's weakness as a writer, in developing characters and writing dialogue, don't stand out in this book, as the characters are archetypes; vehicles for his stories and vignettes, and the dialogue is minimal.
I wondered when reading this book if Bail didn't originally conceive of it as a way to use his undeveloped story ideas, but it is more complex and clever than that. It is, at the end, a quirky love story. Worth the re-reading.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
No comments:
Post a Comment