High Seas, High Culture: 'The Voyage' by Murray Bail

What does high culture look like? We've heard the sound of music, but how does it look? (A: Not like life at the supermarket.)

From the blurb:

Frank Delage, piano manufacturer from Sydney, travels to Vienna, a city immersed in music, to present the Delage concert grand. He hopes to impress with its technical precision, its improvement on the old pianos of Europe. How could he not know his piano is all wrong for Vienna? 

But a chance meeting with Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities for Delage—a soiree, a meeting with her daughter Elisabeth, a dinner with an avant garde composer. Now travelling home, on a container ship, with Elisabeth, Frank Delage can begin to tell the real story.

Murray Bail is one of the high priests of Australian fiction, conjurer of that unique bush romance, Eucalyptus, whose real subject may be the power of the imagination. The Voyage is also a romance – to rub it in, a shipboard romance on a vessel named Romance – but the deep subject is, I think, high culture, and the vexed, unstable relationship Australians have with it.

I was asked not to put a ship on the cover; nothing so banal, please! Working up an iPhone sketch I produced an odd image (rough, below left): a hybrid of liner, grand piano and stiletto shoe (see Wifework!). The publisher liked it, amazingly, but the author did not. In retrospect it was too complex in every way. By request I mocked up a keyboard with three hands, illustrating a scene of a duet and hinting at the emotional dynamics (rough, below right). The author didn't mind that one, but I did.

It was the piano key that turned the lock (so to speak). Looking back I saw it all had to be stripped back, conceptually and compositionally. I threw the lot overboard and started looking at pianos.

A grand piano is like an ocean liner. The lid is very like a sail. And despite the perversity of the book's characters going home in a working boat – "not one of the P&O queens, a container ship" – they are still sailing the high seas of culture. The final cover reaches for the pre-war Europe of a more formal era, of the black and white of books and movies and the nostalgic imagination, of piano keys, black tie and evening dress.


Here is the whole jacket (it's a demi hardback). As usual, click to enlarge:

The piano was made from cutting and pasting various bits and then cooked smooth. The bespoke type was Deco inspired; I started with a sans and then adjusted the proportions and thickness, the strokes and arms and counters – I particularly like the "E". It was stamped in foil onto a nice paper-finish stock. With this design the paper stock risks marking in the shops, but as Tom Wolfe says about his white suits, it's “a marvelous, harmless form of aggression,” so you just have to go all the way.