Een Australische tiener zoekt verlossing voor zijn seksuele driften in de dogma's en kieren van het katholieke geloof. Zijn seksuele fantasieën bestrijdt hij met al te planmatige en vaak hilarische waanbeelden met betrekking tot zijn beoogde (en dus zo goed als echte), maar imaginaire perfecte huwelijk met een zorgvuldig geselecteerde toevallige uitverkorene. Wanneer ook daar (in de imaginaire uitwerking van het verdere verloop van zijn huwelijk) de zonde niet volledig blijkt uit te drijven, leidt dat tot het intreden in een katholieke orde. Maar ook dat blijkt uiteindelijk onvoldoende, ...

Uit het zo letterlijke zoeken van Adrian Sherd en zijn zo vanzelfsprekende gevangen zitten in de religieuze moraal komt een haast ondraaglijke wanhoop naar voor, die zowel hilarisch, schrijnend, als herkenbaar is. ( )

The image on the cover of Gerald Murnane's A Season on Earth is immediately recognisable to Melburnians of a certain age. A quick Google search reveals its provenance: the photo is by Neville Bowler from The Age newspaper in 1972 when the CBD in flood was front page news. Chosen by the inimitable W H Chong for the cover image, this photo of a man alone, stranded high and dry yet apparently calm, is just perfect for this book...

As Murnane explains in the introduction, A Season on Earth has history. It was originally published in 1976 as A Lifetime on Clouds by Heinemann – in truncated form with just two of the four sections from the original manuscript. Indeed this the form in which I bought the 2013 Text Classics edition at the Boyd Community Library in Southbank. I had gone to hear Murnane in conversation with Andy Griffith, who wrote the introduction. (Although the book is now available in its entirety, I shan't be jettisoning A Lifetime on Clouds because I like the introduction. And I wish I'd asked Murnane to autograph it when I had the chance!)

The story, such as it is, comprises the droll activities of a character called Adrian Sherd. What's this? you may ask, since Murnane is so adamant in his later books that it is facile to expect characters (or plots) in fiction. Well, A Season on Earth is Murnane's second novel, for all that its publication is his 15th published work. It's a bildungsroman, and in the first section Adrian in the 1950s seems a lot like an adolescent 'character', one who is obsessed with elaborate sexual fantasies which take place in America. The second section reveals his marriage to a good Catholic woman of extraordinary fertility – but like his sizzling sexual experiences in America from Part One, none of it is real. It's all his vivid imagination, struggling to reconcile his strict religious upbringing in a mundane suburb of Melbourne with his adolescent sexuality. This is followed by the two sections excised from A Lifetime on Clouds: Adrian joins a religious order but discovers it's not his vocation. As we learn in Part Four, it's writing that is his vocation, and the whole book has been about his intellectual and emotional journey towards a creative life.

But I'm minded here to quote the New York Times, cited on the Text Publishing website because it describes exactly how I read Murnane. When I first read his fiction it was new to me and I tried to make it fit into my experience of reading. I don't do that now: I let my mind wander where it will, as suggested by the NYT:

‘Reading Murnane, one cares less about what is happening in the story and more about what one is thinking about as one reads. The effect of his writing is to induce images in the reader’s own mind, and to hold the reader inside a world in which the reader is at every turn encouraged to turn his or her attention to those fast flocking images.’

Since A Season on Earth is an early work, reading it is less like having images triggered by the text and more like a 'story'. The reader is never in doubt about what's real and what's not, even though Adrian himself has difficulty separating his fantasy life from the real one. Nevertheless some of the images are catalysts for a good chuckle:

After he had set the table for tea, Adrian read the sporting pages of The Argus and then glanced through the front pages for the cheesecake picture that was always somewhere among the important news. It was usually a photograph of a young woman in bathers leaning far forward and smiling at the camera.

If the woman was an American film star he studied her carefully. He was always looking for photogenic starlets to play small roles in his American adventures.

If she was only a young Australian woman he read the caption ('Attractive Julie Starr found Melbourne's autumn sunshine too tempting to resist. The breeze was chilly, but Julie, a telephonist aged eighteen, braved the shallows at Elwood in her lunch hour and brought back memories of summer') and spent a few minutes trying to work out the size and shape of her breasts. Then he folded up the paper and forgot about her. He wanted no Melbourne typists and telephonists on his American journeys. He would feel uncomfortable if he saw on the train one morning some woman who had shared his American secrets only the night before. (p.16)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/19/a-season-on-earth-by-gerald-murnane/ ( )