Emerald Blue

by Gerald Murnane

In Far Fields
Pink Lining
Boy Blue
Emerald Blue
The Interior of Gaaldine

Genres: Short Stories

215 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.

In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.

Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have always been interested in what is usually called the world but only insofar as it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world. I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world. I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists. And whenever I have read a piece of fiction that seemed to me worthy to be read, whether the author of that fiction was myself or another person, I have always read with the purpose of suggesting to myself that a world might exist beyond the world suggested by the fiction, even if that further world was suggested only by such passages in the fiction as a report of the narrator’s reading a text that he could not understand or of a character’s dreaming a dream that was not reported in the text.”

Gerald Murnane’s fifth novel, which sold only a few hundred copies and was the last of his works published before departing from fiction writing into a decade-long hiatus, is a luminous, refractory gem of a book that traverses a map made of images and feelings across the author’s singularly quirky mind. However, it wasn’t the poor sales that caused him to quit writing, as the heading of the last story reads “A true account of certain events recalled on the evening when I decided to write no more fiction.” It is both a Bildungsroman and a novel of middle-aged discontent; both autobiographical and not; melancholic in its Proustian reveries and recollection, but also surprisingly comedic in its absurdist scenarios—the biggest laugh being when the narrator or the implied author takes a sea journey on a ship for the first time ever, gets himself stuck in a life-jacket, then gets extremely drunk and disoriented for three days in Tasmania and is visited by a strange woman—this climax is maybe the most tension you’ll ever encounter in Murnane. There is, of course, imaginary horse racing involved, and a lot of grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. This is an author at the very peak of his ability, perhaps intended at the time as a final statement, but even then, it contains explicit admissions that he will return to writing fiction in the future.

This desperately needs to be reprinted; it may be his masterpiece.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always love reading Gerald Murnane, his writing is so singular, it reminds me of no one else. In Emerald Blue, like in every other book of his I've read, Murnane makes circuitous connections between ostensibly independent images with the innocent hope of deriving meaning. As Murnane connects mental images of flat grasslands with the colours of lilac and white found on a horse jockey's jacket, in prose of an uncomplicated vocabulary, the reader somehow gets the palpable impression that they're witnessing the internal workings of the experience of mind in a way much more convincing than can be done from simply reading someone's journal. When I arrive at the last page of one of his stories, I'm invariably anxious with anticipation to discover how he'll reach the destination.