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Voyage
Voyage
Murray Bail
MacLehose Press, 2014
176 pp., 3.65

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Jane Zwart


The Voyage

A quiet argument about memory.

Murray Bail's The Voyage came out in Australia, which its narrator repeatedly calls "the New World," two years ago. At which point critics heaped praise—and even some prize money—on the novelist. But this book saw print in that other New World, the United States, only months ago. The delay makes sense: Bail's fiction is stunning. That is, its brilliance is hard work.

Even the first pages of The Voyage demand effort. Bail indulges his bent toward impressionistic, slow exposition. Take the description of smug, "music-saturated" Vienna: "The dark trees, the streets and boulevards, the clothing of people and the expressions people arranged around their mouths, even the air they breathed, were blurry or furry with the accumulation of words, congestion in the guise of world-weariness." Between such sentences, the book points distractedly to Sydney or Brisbane or Perth, and also sketches a container ship headed to Australia. The ship, oddly christened The Romance, is "stacked with [ … ] rectangles of various faded colors," and is held together by "rivets the size of dinner plates."

Thus, at its simplest, the voyage promised by the book's title is just this: a ship churns from one continent (Europe) to another (Australia).

But for Frank Delage, the novel's key character, the voyage is a roundtrip and not simple. In Austria, romantically entangled with both a grande dame of the arts, the wealthy and still arresting Amalia von Schalla (a decade or so his senior), and her daughter Elisabeth (a decade or so his junior), Frank makes a habit of misjudgment, of losing the thread of his original intentions. Originally, after all, the 46-year-old manufacturer-turned-far-traveling-salesman heads to Vienna to promote a radical invention that the book holds off naming and that the city's elites find suspicious. In championing it and comporting himself, he fails to read social codes. He proves a ham-handed entrepreneur (if a deft engineer). And, at the end of his dubious European ordeal, he trusts The Romance to grant him quiet, supposing that container ships are generally unpopular with all but misfits eager to keep to themselves—another misguided assumption.

The novel, meanwhile, assumes that we would not keep its protagonist company without the incentive of repeated coy allusions to his invention, "a remarkable product, in every way an example of New World ingenuity," which crop up repeatedly in its opening.

I can see why, although Elisabeth keeps Delage company eagerly enough. She shows him the sights in Vienna, first at her mother's behest and then without it. And when Delage departs, she follows him; uninvited but sure of her welcome, she meets his ship at a port in Piraeus, Greece. Standing at the bottom of the gangway, she is all wry gaiety and expensive luggage, and her arrival is the book's last major surprise. At page 26.

Put plainly: The Voyage is slow and short on plot. The most dramatic events in this novel happen offstage and garner little attention from the principal characters. To wit: A man's house burns to the ground, inspiring mostly flippant commentary: "And you say his house caught fire? What some people will do to attract attention." A boat's pilot drowns with as little fanfare as Brueghel's Icarus. A trumpeter exhumed from an avalanche survives but appears in the novel's present only to drive one of Amalia von Schalla's cars and ossify into archetype.

Indeed, apart from such anecdotes, which it holds aloof, this story stirs up only a little suspense. For instance: What is the invention Frank Delage has come to Vienna to champion? Will he pursue the mother or daughter? But it also dispenses with that suspense too soon. For instance: A piano. Yes, both, in turn. It offers in the place of that suspense something else, a more languid uncertainty.

I think the barter a fair one.

True, some readers will not find it worthwhile to stick around past the unveiling of Frank's contraption and the disrobing of the von Schalla women. For others, though—for me—the novel's early bait is almost irrelevant. I read The Voyage (past the revelation of its small mysteries) for the same reason I re-read Mrs. Dalloway (which remains compelling even after it loses the suspense of a first reading). I read them because they narrate the way the mind covers for its records' skipping, a phenomenon almost impossible to narrate, let alone make beautiful, which they do. I read them because they insist that my thoughts rub elbows with yours, and because they make their case by hopping from one character's thoughts to another's on slight pretexts but without gimmickry.

In consequence, the surprises in such fictions reside in their swiveling, blurry-edged vision. In the middle of long paragraphs, The Voyage wings from the deck of The Romance to Mozart's quarters in Austria, its line of flight an impulse of Delage's memory or the natural trajectory of Elisabeth's glancing backward—and its shift in setting unmarked.

Often, in fact, on shifting from one incident to another, Bail begins the new scene with a phrase that, read as a figure of speech, could easily belong to the very circumstances that his narrative has just veered away from. Take Delage's recollection of Elisabeth aiding him, in a Viennese warehouse, to show his piano off; the memory tilts more than it ends, almost blindfolding the reader whom it spirits back to the cargo ship's rail:

At this point, Elisabeth slid alongside Delage on the stool, as if she were slipping into bed, he said to her later, removing his hand from the keyboard, and began to play softly [ … ] all of which, although hardly to concert standard, allowed the critic to close his eyes, listen carefully. The way the wind changed: constantly, rapidly, it was indicated by the waves. At a glance the officers could measure the wind to a scale.

The change in the wind: it seems at first a metaphor (almost a cliché) for the Austrian critic's altered manner, and maybe it is. But it is also, undeniably, a meteorological reality onboard a ship bound for Australia. Call it, therefore—this phrase, "the way the wind changed"—a smudge at the edge of either scene. And note that the officers blur the boundaries of music and weather further by "measur[ing] the wind to a scale."

Such blurred frontiers between past and present, between there and here, turn up everywhere in The Voyage. Thus, Bail, like Woolf, makes a quiet argument about memory—that it is liquid. Granted, it varies in viscosity: sometimes more willing than water, sometimes decanting slow as glass. In the end, though, all memory is liquid, and its truths, each with its own pigment (sometimes dilute, sometimes distilled), blend in this fiction to stunning effect.

However, Bail's latest novel goes further than that. It argues, still quietly and artfully if fiercely, that human consciousness, from memory on up (or down) is, in the end, no less a sea than the one The Romance bobs on. This sea, of course, has as many tributaries as there are stories, and all of them tinted. Tainted, too. So no thimbleful of its ocean is simple. On the contrary, beauty and sadness and wisdom and falsehood swarm us, always, in shallows and in undertows, and they are always familiar and always strange.

The Voyage is a thimbleful of this sea, albeit a fictional thimbleful. As for its tributaries, Delage's narrative is rain saved in a splintery barrel, and Elisabeth's is ladled from brooks' snow-melt and nobles' fountains, while the story spilled by a Dutchman, another passenger on The Romance, is puddle-colored.

And Murray Bail? He is, of course, the artist who wets his paintbrush in that tiny metal cup, then renders the imperfections of memory and perception and judgment in perfect watercolor.

Jane Zwart teaches writing and literature at Calvin College.

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