Eucalyptus Book

Nothing else, I guess Eucalyptus lives up to its title. It's about a man whose wife dies while giving birth to their daughter. The man collects the life insurance, moves to a small town in western New South Wales, and plants eucalypts… lots of them. Apparently there are over 200 specie of this plant. Once his daughter is of a marriageable age he makes an Atalantan (as in the golden apple/race myth) deal to marry her off to the first suitor who can name all the various eucalypts on his land. That process is basically Act II of the book, and it's about as exciting as it sounds. Oh, and each chapter is named for a specie of Eucalypt.

This was ultimately a very frustrating book. I mean I love eucalyptus trees about as much as a kola bear does. But, we're talking a predictable plodding plot. And, sexist?'oh honey, it's all that'in a way that defies direct implication (beautiful inactive frequently naked daughters, grotesque obsessive delinquently powerful men, arranged marriages, little snipes here and there like in speaking of the outback "…let's not forget the isolation, the exhausted shapeless women…" which as a hiccup might almost appear benign but consolidated turns into this constant goat-getting action, etc).

What's truly maddening is that Murray Bail is a capable writer. He has a great ear for tone and a masterful ability with sentences. Sentences. This is the tragedy of the sentence. In other words, I feel like I'm circling a beef with, like, sentences critically, and I suppose it is this… when all else fails'theme, conscience, geometry, plot'as readers, we fall back on the sentence. If the writer can lay down an inviting sentence… we tend toward trust. The problem is great sentences have been called on to propound dreadful stuff. There's a tangle that results between sentence as sign and sentence as signifier'or something along those lines. See, the Noun Verb Object trick can actually wind up implicating writer and reader both in as far as they become complicit with said sentence's nefarious values. I don't know. I suppose I'm only saying this: a series of great sentences cannot be an end in itself… somewhere along the line ethics slips in, and in the absence of their careful weight even the best grammatical clauses fall to pieces.

If ya need an example, check these Bail-isms out: "It may not be exaggerated to say that the formidable instinct in men to measure, which is often mistaken for pessimism, is counterbalanced by the unfolding optimism of women, which is nothing less than life itself; their endless trump card. It is shown in miniature by the reverence women have for flowers, at its most concentrated when they look up and in recognition of their natural affinity accept flowers." Lovely sentences, rotten meaningless ideas.