 He notes that Bail is particularly interested in the relationship between language and reality, and that this is evident in his early short stories.Clancy says "the stories display the strange mixture of surrealist fantasy and broad satire of Australian mores that characterizes all of Bail's work".After early success with short fiction, Bail turned to the novel as a form commensurate with his vision of life's complexity, which emerges in all its perplexing intricacy in "Homesickness".