Tree, bark, paper, novel: 'The Pages' by Murray Bail

An author 's last two novels, with two-word titles, have only five letters difference: The Voyage – The Pages.

Tree and ship.

Paper and piano.

Log is boat.

Sheet is music. 

The cover of Murray Bail's 2012 novel, The Voyage, has a piano lid which evokes sailing. His novel before, The Pages (2008), has the bark of a gum tree, with lettering on it, as if on paper. Word pictures – one is one plus one is two...

Here is the demi hardback of The Pages.

From the blurb:

On a family sheep station in western New South Wales, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing his philosophy. Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his life’s work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs distracting from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis.

Murray Bail’s The Pages is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself...

The Voyage (previous post) cover was easily arrived at compared to The Pages. The latter accrued six versions, each with several variations. Here are v3 and v4 (a more fastidious system would make it v3.1 – v3.6 and then v4.1 – v4.5):

 

Cover design v1.4 featured a photograph of clasped hands – a weathered beefy farmer's and a female's, pale and freckled. This was regarded with enormous disdain by everyone else in the office. I thought it was a nice gesture towards a surprisingly warm story.

The thinking got more abstract – and more literal: it entered the arena of paper and pages before it went tangent into trees and bark and gum and the land.

And the lineage keeps going back: the finished cover may as well have been done for the novel before The Pages: Eucalyptus.


Here is the UK edition cover, keeping up their usual symbols of the big outdoors populated with rustics that the British imagine are the Antipodes (when we are not in Ramsay St).