Gerald Murnane, A Season on Earth.

- This long novel is in four equal parts. There are no chapters. It's a slow burn and intensely powerful. 

- The first two parts were published separately in 1976 in a novel titled A Lifetime On Clouds. The final two parts have been published in this new release for the first time, although Murnane submitted the four parts for publication at the same time in the 1970s. The half-century delay is shameful.

- For the undeniable fact is that this novel is a masterpiece. ALL FOUR PARTS OF IT.

- We are transported deep into the sexual obsessions of young teenage boys who attend a Catholic high school in suburban Melbourne. Adrian Sherd and his friends are constantly cleaning their pipes and fantasising about having sex with Hollywood movie stars, and talking to each other about it. 

- They are devout Catholics. 

- The constant observation about people and places, and relentlessly building drama into microscopic ordinariness is typical Murnane. The voice in this novel however is that of the teenage Adrian and it’s pitch perfect. 

- On the surface it’s a comic tale. Adrian’s attraction to the pretty Denise on the train is funny. The names of the Catholic sodalities and parishes are truly awesome. And his Aunt Kathleen is a pious fool, inculcating all sorts of nonsense into Adrian’s head. The fake Irish and Italian stories of heroic sacrifices of fervent believers fed to generations of Catholics are all there. 

- However, underneath this seemingly innocent facade is a searing indictment of the primitive and fundamentally inhuman beliefs and practices of the appalling cult that was Irish-Catholicism in Australia in the mid 20th century. The Church had no understanding of, or care whatsoever for, the psychological, emotional and sexual development of the young people under its care. What the Brothers and visiting priests were communicating to the students on a daily basis was bog-Irish ignorant in the extreme. Murnane is remorseless in his portrayal of this brutal version of child abuse. 

- As a victim of this tradition myself I felt the pain. (I vividly remember the scary prophecies a Brother Viator told us in grade six, which Murnane refers to, about how the Communists would invade Australia in the 60’s and the priests would be hung from lamp posts in Melbourne in 1970).

- Adrian’s marriage dreams are pure adolescent fantasies, meant to control his lusts. He also thinks he’s remarkably like the author and monk Thomas Merton! ‘Thomas Merton had written about the great monastic revival sweeping the United States. Young men all over the country were realising that a monastery was the only place where they could live a sane life’. 

- Before graduating from high school Adrian is judged intelligent and mature enough to be accepted into a junior seminary to train to be a priest. On a whim he decides to chose a religious order, rather than the secular priesthood. In both streams however the theological ignorance pushed into young immature minds in those days was astonishing. (Which makes me wonder whether this book would appeal to non-Catholics at all).

- In the seminary Adrian begins to question familiar precepts, and imagine other careers. Is he beginning to liberate himself? Hardly. If anything his immature piety is making him sillier, for example his longing to join the Cistercian monks and leave the Charleroi seminary in his search for ‘the true perfection of God’. Which he doesn’t do thankfully, although he does leave the seminary.

- His imagination though is still vivid. He dreams of lecturing in English or Philosophy or school teaching or becoming a poet. ‘...even though he had put aside his ambition to be a priest or a monk, he was still called to a special vocation and marked out from other men’. 

- He’s always deciding to dedicate his life to transient obsessions. England and its nature scenes are one. He choses not to continue his schooling and matriculate. He’s rooted in otherworldliness. As a reader I found myself crying out: 'Just matriculate, go to university, and get a fucking life!' 

- He becomes obsessed with poetry. English poets in particular, like Arnold, Thompson, Patmore and Housman - one after the other. He wants to be one, and to lead a solitary, single, sage-like life. (‘He tried to keep a fairly troubled expression on his face’). In the end he discovers Rimbaud. 

- In the meantime, to get some money, he lands a junior job in the public service. Here's an interesting line: ‘He began to keep a lookout for other young public servants who might have pursued unusual interests in the evenings behind the drawn blinds of suburban houses’.

- He later discovers through another English poet that a ‘pure marriage’ was just as sure a path to God as a life in Holy Orders. So has he turned a corner? 

- He's now 18 years old, still immature, and still attracted to some form of monasticism. But a saving grace undoubtedly is that he’s developing a very sharp consciousness of traditional roles and the expectations of society - informed as it is by the Women’s Weekly, and inflamed by his fevered imagination. 

- Nevertheless I left the novel convinced that young Adrian Sherd will eventually grow into a mature and attractive adult. He will have survived his upbringing and be freed.