Book Review - Homesickness by Murray Bail

Homesickness by Murray Bail

Melbourne: Macmillan Australia, 1980          ISBN 0333298969

I've reviewed a couple of Murray Bail books here in the past, and have never been quite sure what to make of his work, and his style. Homesickness, his first novel, hasn't got me any closer to working out my feelings toward his work.

Charting the journey of a group of Australian tourists through Africa, England, New York and Russia, Homesickness is a meditation on travel, the western tourist, experience, photography, and love. Bail shows us, through his characters, and through their experiences, something about the Australian psyche (as it was in 1980), and the shallowness of the touristic experience.

Bail uses the trope of the museum to say a lot about tourism, and Australia. The reader gets a first inkling that this book is going to be different when the group head into the jungle to the pygmy museum, only to see pygmies dressed as westerners, doing things that westerners do. This will not be the first time that the concept of the museum is turned on it's head. The museum of corrugated iron they visit in Yorkshire is an occasion for Bail - through the scene and characters - to expound on the practicality of the Australian psyche, on how we take things for granted, and on the Australian cultural cringe, which co-exists with the Australian desire to explain to the World how great the country is.

Bail also writes about art and photography. One of the characters is an inveterate photographer, who also happens to be blind, and while in London one of the group is disgusted to find that all the art galleries have replaced their exhibitions with photographs. Although he couldn't know it at the time, this is a wonderful comment on today's photographic culture, where the photograph is more important than the experience being photographed. The concept of a blind photographer is apt - so busy taking photographs that he can't see, and has to have his experience explained to him by his wife.

The group is diverse and yet homogeneous, an unlikely group of travelers who become more familiar with each other, and with the reader, as the book progresses. We have many archetypes, the Ocker, the know-it-all, the snob, the middle-class prude, all reacting differently to each experience. We never do discover why or how they came to be travelling in a group, and they never question it either, or leave, even when they are unhappy.

The travel by the group is in many sense aimless, and seems to become more so as the book progresses - perhaps yet another comment on the phenomena of tourism; what is learnt, what is gained from such travel? The experiences always tend toward the banal, even when, as here, they are completely bizarre, such as the museum of gravity in Moscow....a completely strange surreal place, but the traveller's reactions are the typical ones you would hear in any group.

So, to go back to my opening lines, what to make of this book? I'm still unsure....I enjoyed reading it though.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell