My next novel Mural is in the shops. Published by Transit Lounge, it’s officially launched on Sunday.
Forgetting any qualities the writing might or might not have, it’s a glorious piece of work, a hardback with a gorgeous cover, its paper wood-free but having a lovely fresh-tobacco whiff.
Its typeface is Adobe Garamond Pro, which is elegant and easy to read. The text runs to 195 pages, which surprised me, but many black-and-white photographs flesh it out.
Mural is creative prose fiction, but it contains true biographical details about two famous men. The first spent his teenage years teaching — not terribly successfully — in rural New South Wales. Intrigued by the power of lust, he decided at 16 to make the study of sex his life’s work. He went on to become the English-speaking-world’s most famous sexologist. His early years in rural Australia have never before been described in detail.
The second was Australia’s greatest public artist, measured alone in the quality of his drafting and the area covered by his mosaics, murals and stained-glass windows. Napier Waller is best-known for his glass windows in Canberra’s War Memorial. Another curious character, he had his painting hand removed after having been critically wounded in World War I. He taught his left hand to do what his right did, as he put it, and went on in the following decades to a hugely successful career. Before then, however, he made several erotic watercolors, many of the nude girls depicted in them appearing to be barely teenagers.
But above and beyond the true biographical details of these two men, Mural is totally imagined. It’s literary fiction, owing something to the styles of the great German writers W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. Read it
and meet a host of strange characters. The inside dust-jacket blurb mentions a Frenchman who went mad because he believed huge prehistoric stones in Brittany were shifting. It says the tale is true. Not a bit of it! I made it up, and it’s my fault entirely that I must have missed the word ‘true’ in one of my proof-reading sessions.
Enjoy Mural.