Since Inland (1988), Murnane has pursued what could be described as an ongoing portrait of the mind’s inner landscape. As the already comparatively lightly peopled worlds of earlier works such as Tamarisk Row (1974) and The Plains (1982) – still his masterpiece – receded from view, what was left was Murnane’s evocation of the readerly brain and its lingering images, a kind of excavation of memory reconstructed in suspended animation and endlessly inspected. After Emerald Blue (1995), it seemed Murnane’s words might have run dry, and there followed a fourteen-year silence before the re-emergence, with Barley Patch (2009), of a fiction opening with the question ‘Must I write?’ In that work, the traditional building blocks were at last done away with in favour of a unique style.

Rather than describe or evoke any outside world, what Murnane has been pursuing fervently in his recent work is a transcription (in recollection) of fiction’s effect upon his brain: to put it plainer, the image world that overcomes Murnane as he reads, and, after that, the images that stay with him after time has its way. These are inward whorls of thought and remembrance, endlessly moving between the mind that remembers and the younger man that experienced; the fictionalised man, that is. That it is so engrossing is in large part due to the agonisingly precise style employed, a prose of long and syntactically sound sentences that build their case with the unhurried majesty of a Proustian legal brief.

And now, background established, this new book; Murnane still must write, it seems. Categorically speaking, it is a novella and three shorter fictions, with an authoritative-sounding title that couldn’t be more misleading. A History of Books could as well be titled A History of My Reading. The material, without Murnane’s distinctive treatment, could easily be spun as the early adventures of the young-writer-in-development: the looking to other books of fiction as examples and guides; the noting of particularly vivid words; the long woodshedding before artistic arrival. The treatment, however, is utterly original. In a series of disconnected fragments, a figure of varying ages, resembling Murnane in numerous ways, brings to life in his mind various images from books the figure remembers reading. They are presented as crucial moments in the life of a remembering figure, residue-generating moments of development. What is denied is the connective tissue of anecdote related to later achievement. The young writer or fiction creator doesn’t know he’ll be a success, or that those images will even make it on to a page. All he has are the fragments waiting to be assembled. Each fragment details Murnane’s engagement with a new text, often identifiable from a quoted line or authorial description, often more obscure. A list is provided at the back of the book, if you wish to cheat.

What is particularly distinctive is how particular Murnane’s reading is, how unique. He is no ravenous bibliophile or prodigious memoriser of work. Like most readers, whether they admit it or not, what he finds upon inspection is the barest cupboard of literary memory: a striking image here, a line there, a striking author photograph there. This isn’t the confident erudition of a well-read man parading his learning over an audience; it is the distinct and personalised account of a unique artist laying bare his stockpile of images, his mind’s workings.

As with much recent Murnane, one can (nervously) identify three presences at work in the prose: the man remembering; the figure that the mind remembers; and the images in the mind of this recalled or imagined figure. The prose is full of qualifications and indeterminacy. Only quotation can do its strange beauty justice:

An image of a man and an image of a young woman appeared at the base of a tall image-cliff. These images appeared in the mind of a certain young man while he was sitting beside a campfire at the base of a tall cliff and trying to explain to a certain young woman what he remembered having read in certain passages of a certain book that he considered, so he told the young woman, a neglected masterpiece of English literature. Since the young man spoke as though the image-persons were actual persons, they will be thus described in the following paragraphs.

That so much of Murnane’s textual slipperiness doesn’t play at all like the frequently self-regarding and attention-seeking habits of postmodernism is a testament to how distinctive Murnane’s vision is, and how personalised. The endless elaboration of detail in his work, the seriousness of purpose, mark him as a genuine original, forever skirting close to solipsism but somehow, with each book, emerging with something earned, necessary, true.

Worth mentioning in brief are the book’s three shorter works, although comparatively slight, and certainly lesser Murnane. The most amusing, and most engagingly original, ‘The Boy’s Name Was David’, is further proof that perhaps the finest writers don’t end up as the greatest teachers. Combining Murnane’s obsession with horse racing with a portrait of his years as a creative writing teacher, the piece is both typically obsessive and quietly humorous (a rarely commented-upon feature in Murnane’s work).

And so back to the question of autobiography, and this book’s ultimate achievement. To what end are its interior ruminations and image-worlds, its teasing parity to the life of its author? Of course, the use of autobiographical material in fiction is a sore point with many writers and readers alike, and one of the great intangibles of creative work. To point out, using just one of many possible examples, that the protagonists of Saul Bellow’s novels tend to reflect their creator in age, background, marital status is both a diverting conversational topic and stunningly beside the point. These autobiographical reductions always do art a disservice and radically misunderstand the work involved in taking life – that amorphous, general, endless blob of human matter – and giving it the insisted-upon shape of art.

A History of Books is a fiction – something Murnane strenuously asserts again and again – yet very close to auto-biography. It is a book about a life of dreaming, reading, floating images, and deeply private creation, taking the form of the dream, not the assured reality. It is indeed a Portrait of The Artist as a Young Image-Finder.