As Murray Bail's first novel in ten years, The Pages, is about to be published, he is interviewed by Susan Wyndham for "The Age".
Ten years sounds like a long time between books but Bail has not been idle."This seems to be a ghastly pattern: I started another novel and spent 18 months, maybe two years on it, then I put it aside. It's not to say I won't go back to it. It was nothing but a man and woman talking and I thought, aside from the difficulty, I was sick of men and women talking anyway but there had to be more underneath.
"The same thing happened with Eucalyptus. I spent a couple of years mucking around with a book that I wasn't comfortable with. I chucked that one out."
