Fulfilment is forever deferred, but the quest remains as obsessive as Jay Gatsby’s doomed pursuit of Daisy Buchanan. This quest is frequently represented by Murnane as the illusion created by flat landscapes, by plains, with the promise forever on the horizon, seemingly within reach but inevitably retreating as the viewer approaches. Murnane’s readers will also recognise in those few spare opening words a microcosm of the emotional resonance that the writer has brought to Australian fiction for four decades – a solipsistic and neo-romantic yearning for a moment of revelation, of epiphany, whereby everything will be explained.Īs Murnane wrote in another novel, “One of the first things I discovered about the world was that I seemed shut out of the best part of it”, and his fiction has been a relentless quest to reveal that “best part”.
In the case of Gatsby, this is offshore into the nouveau riche enclaves of jazz era Long Island in The Plains the movement is in the other direction: inland, into the sitting-rooms, libraries and corridors of the great houses of the established old-money pastoral families who dominate the plains.
Comparisons between the two novels do not end there – both are effectively no more than novellas, with The Plains weighing in at a mere 126 pages in its original edition and both take us into the mansions of a fabled and gilded aristocracy.
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