AustLit

'Roger Osborne’s The Life of Such Is Life lives up to its title. After finishing this book, it’s hard to disagree with that descriptor of Furphy’s novel. It is alive. That inert object we have on our bookshelves is a living entity, and possibly more than most literary texts, the history of the origin of that physical text shows many similarities to the evolution of a species under selective pressure, to use some of the terminology Furphy would have been familiar with from his reading of Darwin. Moreover, for us in the twenty-first century, hypersensitive to the insights of ecology, we can see that the physical evolution of the printed text depended on the physical ecologies of the publishing and printing industries of Australia, Great Britain, and the United States of America, as well as the metaphysical environment of the “ecology of minds” (to use Gregory Bateson’s term) of the readers whose recorded and unrecorded readings over the past 120 years have created the text(s) (we have to include Rigby’s Romance and The Buln-buln and the Brolga) as we know them today. Osborne gives us a comprehensive account of the physical and metaphysical milieux which produced the phenomenon of Furphy’s grand opus in both its trinitarian and singular manifestations. If that sounds somewhat theological, it might not be out of place, given the number of claims that Such Is Life is our foundational literary narrative, akin to Don Quixote or Moby Dick, claims that surface regularly in the various attempts to keep Such Is Life in print, as Osborne shows.' (Introduction)