Gerald Murnane

Wayne Macauley

Plains

A satirical and surreal twist on the Anzac legend of Simpson and his donkey

Simpson Returns

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Power through service, says Head Chef. It's one of the first lessons taught at Cook School, where troubled youths learn to be master chefs by bowing to decadence and whim, by offering up a part of themselves on every plate. It's a motto Zac takes to heart. A teenage boy with a difficult past, he throws himself into the world and work of haute cuisine. He has dreams of a future, of escaping the dead-end, no-hope lot of his fellow cooks. He wants to be the greatest chef the world has seen. He thinks he's taken his first steps when he becomes House Cook for a wealthy family. Never mind that the family may seem less than appreciative. Or refined. Or deserving. Power through service. But as the facade crumbles and his promised future looks unlikely to eventuate, Zac the Cook is forced to reassess everything. Sweet turns sour and ends in bitter revenge. Blackly funny and deliciously satirical, The Cook feeds our hunger to know what goes on in the kitchen, while skewering our culture of food worship.

The Cook

They were going to tell stories. Let’s go away for the weekend, said Megan, and leave our phones behind and turn off the computers and television and stop time because time is moving too fast and soon we’ll all be saying where the hell did our lives go? We’ll cook some food and drink some wine and each tell a story. It is the middle of winter. Seven friends travel to a remote coastal beach house for the weekend. Without phones, internet or television, they sit around the fireplace, telling stories – each exposing the foibles of humankind. But as a storm rolls in and torrential rain cuts the party off from the outside world, it soon becomes clear that some secrets are best kept hidden. Demons is an extraordinary novel by one of Australia’s great writers.

Demons

It begins with the normally healthy Beth—aged-care worker, wife of David, mother of Lettie and Em—feeling vaguely off-colour. A locum sends her to Dr Yi for some tests. ‘There are a few things here that aren’t quite right,’ says Dr Yi, ‘and sometimes it is these little wrongnesses that can lead us to the bigger wrongs that matter.’ Beth is sent on to Dr Twoomey for more tests. Then to another specialist, and another...Referral after referral sees her bumped from suburb to suburb, bewildered, joining busloads of people all clutching white envelopes and hoping for answers. But what is actually wrong with Beth—is anything, in fact, wrong with her? And what strange forces are at work in the system? As the novel reaches its stunning climax, we realise how strange these forces are. Unnerving and brilliant, Some Tests is about waking up one morning and finding your ordinary life changed forever. Wayne Macauley is the author of the acclaimed novels Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, Caravan Story, The Cook and Demons. The Cook was shortlisted for a Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award. ‘Macauley has published some of the most memorable fiction going in this country. His books and stories are satirical fables in which the properties are recognisably contemporary and Australian...His narratives [can] take off into the bizarre without ever losing their cool.’ The Age ‘A darkly surreal tale of how illness of any kind turns a person’s world inside out—and a philosophical lament at the alienating effects of modern medical systems. This is Macauley at his brilliant, poetic best, using the fable form to broadcast an existential wake-up call to his readers, asking us to reconsider how we live and die—but at the same time, as the best art does, reminding us that we do not suffer alone.’ Ceridwen Dovey ‘Some Tests is a completely unique offering among the recent spate of books about illness, death and Western medicine. With eerie touches of strangeness that quickly progress to the surreal, Macauley turns the mundane consultation into utterly compelling reading. You will never see a waiting room the same way.’ Readings ‘Despite its subject matter, humour and warmth are woven into the deceptively uncomplicated writing. There’s a large range of characters, but Macauley gives each of the important ones definition and life.’ Otago Daily Times ‘The novel raises timely and important questions.’ SA Weekend ‘Unnerving and brilliant.’ Outthere ‘Wayne Macauley is an entertaining satirist who mercilessly exposes Australian follies, and I like his novels very much.’ ANZ Lit Lovers ‘In his new novel, Some Tests...There is an anger here transformed into bemusement, which in turn finds a darker, more surreal form...Though Macauley’s allegorical prowess remains undimmed, this is perhaps the most straightforward and direct book he’s written...[A] compelling style...The shock of the familiar, vividly portrayed.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘Wayne Macauley’s eclectic new novel, Some Tests, tackles the topic of death in a surreal way.’ Guardian ‘For something that’s built on such a high concept idea, Macauley manages to bring a lot of tension out of the narrative. Its clear goals and problems are refreshing, the prose itself clear and unadorned—Macauley has a gift for rendering tedium in a very readable fashion.’ Kill Your Darlings ‘If there’s a test really worth taking, a choice really worth making, it’s to read Some Tests, and all of Macauley’s writing, and see where you end up.’ Australian ‘Some Tests is neither a didactic nor an angry book. It’s actually very funny...[It] is ultimately a strange novel, amusing and very often frightening. And also, potentially, instructive.’ Sydney Review of Books ‘Wayne Macauley is an Australian original. He writes in a tradition of dystopian satire – associated most famously with George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – but in a stripped-back and absurdist style. His work is a mixture of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee (in allegorical mode), though Macauley’s fictional worlds are always set in Melbourne or greater Victoria. The meaning or relevance of his dystopian satires are to be found locally too, in our country’s follies.’ Saturday Paper ‘A subtle and quietly moving novel about illness and death. Macauley’s stylised and artfully paced narrative, which gradually takes on a dreamlike quality, is a fine example of his ability to evoke the inchoate sense of dissatisfaction and existential disquiet that lurks beneath the surface of contemporary life.’ James Ley, Best Books of 2017, Australian Book Review

Some Tests

Don't let the fact this blurb is unusual stop you reading this book there really are few books like it. Yes it has cooking as an underlying theme like many other books but what those books don't have is sheer passion and inspiration and motivation and drive. It is a story about having the will and strength to succeed that is to say knowing what you are and knowing what you want to be and working as hard as it takes to get where you belong. At seventeen Zac is given a choice: either go to a young offenders' institute, or enrol in a rehabilitation scheme - a course that teaches juveniles how to cook. He makes his choice. He chooses to cook. He also chooses to succeed. Whatever it takes.

Winner of the Patrick White Literary Award, 1999. Introduction by Wayne Macauley. There is no book in Australian literature like The Plains. In the two decades since its first publication, this haunting novel has earned its status as a classic. A nameless young man arrives on the plains and begins to document the strange and rich culture of the plains families. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, ‘a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself’. Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has left Victoria only a handful of times and has never been on an aeroplane. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, and was followed by seven other works of fiction, most recently, Barley Patch. He has also published a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005). In 1999, Gerald Murnane won the Patrick White Award. In 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Wayne Macauley is the author of three novels, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe (2004), Caravan Story (2007) and The Cook (2011), and the short fiction collection Other Stories (2010). He lives in Melbourne. ‘Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.’ Peter Craven ‘A distinguished, distinctive, unforgettable novel.’ Shirley Hazzard ‘Gerald Murnane is unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today and The Plains is a fascinating and rewarding book...The writing is extraordinarily good, spare, austere, strong, often oddly moving.’ Australian ‘A piece of imaginative writing so remarkably sustained that it is a subject for meditation rather than a mere reading...In the depths and surfaces of this extraordinary fable you will see your inner self eerily reflected again and again.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘The Plains has that peculiar singularity that can make literature great.’ Ed Wright, Australian, Best Books of 2015

The Plains: Text Classics

So here I am, I'm going : it happens to us all. There is no rhyme nor reason. Even when you..ve sucked the fingers of the hand that feeds you it can still turn around and grab you by the throat. One morning, without warning, our narrator wakes into a nightmare. He and his female companion are put in a caravan and driven to a football oval in a faraway country town. There they join scores of other caravan-dwellers in a seemingly closed community. They are divided into groups, given their tasks. Then our narrator escapes, to an abandoned school in a big country town. Wayne Macauley has a gift for storytelling. He can, and cannot but help, spin a yarn. It is this continual shifting on of our attention through the description of the particulars of a scene that gives his writing such a weird intensity. Examining the darker side of our manufacture and manipulation of culture, Caravan Story is a deeply unsettling and at times hilarious read. With Macauley's inexorable narrative logic we are held in its thrall until the sparkling, if muted, transfiguration of its ending.

Caravan Story

Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, Wayne Macauley's first novel, is a bitingly dark take on the great Australian dream. Fable-like, effortlessly readable and ultimately moving, it shows us the depth of Macauley's talent. Bram and his fellow residents are drawn by a dream: the promise of a freeway leading to a new suburb north of the city. The houses are built, but the freeway never comes. One by one, the dreamers leave, until only a small, hardcore group is left, including Bram, One-eyed Michael, and Michael's self-possessed daughter Jodie. As the disused houses crumble around them they barricade themselves in. They have a gun, a bulldozer, and a hellbent determination to stay till the end, whatever, whenever, that is. But the authorities have other ideas. Wayne Macauley is a Melbourne writer. He is the author of three highly acclaimed novels, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, Caravan Story and The Cook. 'Wayne Macauley has the soul of a poet and his surreal novella is stunningly written...It is a satire of exquisite poise and confidence...If more Australian literature was of this calibre, we'd be laughing.' Age '[It was] like falling into a bale of barbed wire in the dark and fighting to get out till morning. The more I struggled, the more it got under my skin.' Bulletin 'A salutary fable about the horrors awaiting our disaffected modern citizenry...lasting visual images and resonant symbolism.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Bewitching...ethereal...hallucinatory...In an era when many Australian novelists are playing it safe...Wayne Macauley is an ambitious talent worth watching.' Wet Ink 'Tapping the hidden heart of a different Australia...this is original Australian writing at its best.' Courier Mail

Wayne Macauley

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