'Something for the Pain: A memoir of the turf' by Gerald Murnane

Why would I, who have no interest in horse racing and who seldom reads a memoir or biography, read a book composed almost exclusively of one man’s recollections of the minutiae of horse racing in Victoria, Australia, from the 1940s to the present? Gerald Murnane has written some very interesting, layered and subtle fictions (see my reviews of Inland, Barley Patch and A Million Windows), which have formed in me an opinion of his craft with which he evidently concurs: “My sentences are the best-shaped of any sentences written by any writer of fiction in the English language during my lifetime”. If you are wanting intimations of the interior life of the Australian Proust, you will not find them in this book, largely because you have brought to your search what you must henceforth regard as unwarranted romantic notions. In fact, the mechanisms of Murnane’s literary thinking are all here: the obsessive arrangement and rearrangement of a narrow range of idiosyncratic elements; the interrogation of memory, not to arrive at factual truth as such but as an attempt to recapture the truth of subjective experience, which somehow springs into poignancy from the fine-milling of detail; an acknowledgement of the inescapability of life’s circumscriptions, which, for Murnane, act as subjective intensifiers, providing circumstance with significance beyond the quotidian. As always with Murnane, meaning and banality are separated by the thinnest of membranes, permeable in either direction. Why horse racing? “I find it peculiarly satisfying that the year when Bernborough became famous was the same year in which I began to read the Sporting Globe and to find in horse racing more than I would find in any religious or philosophical system.” And: “I got from horse racing in the first twenty-five years of my life more than I ever got from any friendship or courtship.” Like all religions (and, perhaps, all other fields of human activity), horse racing is irrelevant beyond its own parameters, but is also revealing of deep human needs and aspirations. I will probably never read another book on horse racing. I wonder what someone interested in horse racing would have made of it.

March 2016