Stream System by Gerald Murnane

In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.

The world of Gerald Murnane is an insular one. He has never been on a plane, has never worn sunglasses, has left Australia only for places that can be reached by boat, and lives a hermetic existence in North Victoria. He spends his time keeping detailed files on his own life, something he has been working on since he was young. He's obsessed with horse-racing and has records of thousands of fictional horse races that he's simulated using an arcane system involving picking up random volumes of fiction, choosing a paragraph, and using the data contained in the words to determine the winner. Each of these horses has racing colors a complicated history, and all the races take place in a fictional, but not fantastical, world of his own making.

With an ordinary collection, including so much biographical data would probably be unwise and might serve to obscure the fictions themselves; but Stream System, a collection of all of Murnane's short fiction (a term used loosely since two pieces in this collection crack 100pp) is not a regular collection. There are virtually no character names at all, not a single line of dialog, and very little explicit action. Murnane, throughout the collection, explains bits and bobs about his writing methods through the voices of his narrators, while always taking care to remind the reader, sometimes explicitly, that what they are reading is a work of fiction and not, as they might be tempted to believe, a work of lightly fictionalized autobiography.

And yet, the stories are so internal and the narrators so like Murnane that the collection as a whole has a metafictional quality--what are we to make of dozens of middle aged Australian men who refuse to set foot on planes, who fantasize about race horses, who write fiction exactly like Murnane's? But these narrators also can't be the same person, because they have different backgrounds, different paths that led them to similar places. A Vietnam veteran in Finger Webs, blue collar workers in Stone Quarry and The White Fields of Uppington, a monk in As It Were a Letter, a teacher in When the Mice Failed to Arrive, etc etc.

These characters have in common many things, but one especially: all are driven throughout their lives by images they've seen, read about, conjured, and spend most of their time trying to connect them, and that is what these stories do as well. They achieve their momentum and denouments (almost all of which are spectacular) through the slow accretion of minutae and the revelation of the places created by their mental sediment, The collection's title story, Stream System, makes this explicit--the story takes place entirely as the narrator looks at the titular system and connects the shapes of the various pools to events thoughout his life. The images the characters carry around, sometimes happily, sometimes reluctantly, share many common elements (fathers, time-as-place, isolated phrases from books, race horses, the faces of women) and yet each man is subtly different. But different as they are, none of them are able to ultimately put the images in their heads into an order that solves the puzzle they're all mystified by, the infinite depths of their humanity.

You'd be forgiven, if you didn't read the cover copy, if you completed Stream System and thought it was a novel rather than an omnibus. The stories are of a piece, circling around variations, could-have-been, versions of the same man. And lest this review makes it sound tedious, it's full of dry humor, clever turns of phrase, and a sense of momentum that frankly makes no sense given the subjects of the stories. Murnane is a master of this style and indeed, I suspect he's the only one who could really pull it off, given how much of himself is within his carefully constructed fictions.

Ultimately, Murnane seems ambivalent about even his own work, citing repeatedly Philip  Larkin's line "Books are a load of crap" and giving his characters crises wherein they determine never to read/write again, and to live only within their own minds, a landscape which, even among the many he evokes throughout the stories, feels the most infinite of all.