The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Camouflage, by Murray Bail
reviewed by James Crossley

Murray Bail. Camouflage. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. 195 pp. $20.00.

Australian writer Murray Bail is mainly noted as a novelist, but he’s also produced a small body of short fiction that’s at last available in the U.S. Camouflage assembles fourteen stories (eleven more than the UK edition with the same title, be warned), comprising a tidy overview of his career. It’s hard to tell which of the pieces are of recent vintage, first because the publisher provides no provenances, but more importantly because they’re all equally fresh and equally timeless. Whatever setting Bail depicts, whether it be a suburban backyard, a competitive office, or a reverent museum, he subtly defamiliarizes it, always making it seem new and often rendering it positively uncanny. His style is flexible enough to paint perfect verbal portraits and to experiment with formal boundaries, sometimes in the same paragraph. His prose is economical, almost terse at times, suggestive far beyond what it makes explicit. While there’s no mistaking Bail’s voice, several other authors sprang to mind as I read these stories—Penelope Fitzgerald for her compression of ideas, Steven Millhauser for his dreaminess, Robert Coover for his innovation—and what they all have in common is their confident mastery. Like them, Bail is an assured writer in perfect command, able to achieve any effect he might wish. He can be sedate or shocking by turns, and is frequently funny in either mode, but the most prevalent tone in this volume is one of detached melancholy, as when he writes, “She sat at my kitchen table one afternoon and wept uncontrollably. How can words, particularly ‘wept uncontrollably,’ convey her sadness (her self-pity)? Philosophers other than myself have discussed the inadequacy of words.” Whatever truth there may be in the discussions of those philosophers, there’s no inadequacy in Camouflage.