It's 10 years since Murray Bail published his enchanting novel Eucalyptus, an Australian fable about a father who sets a test for his daughter's suitors: that they must name every one of the hundreds of species of gum-tree he has planted on his land. In the end the beautiful daughter is won not by the man with the most complete memory for eucalypts, but by the one who makes up the best stories. Eucalyptus is very much about story-telling, and its attachment to fable and myth is explained in a withering attack on the sorts of fictions the "national landscape" tends to produce: "There's nothing more dispiriting, deja vu, than to come across another story of disappointment set in the Australian backblocks." The narrator also dislikes urban versions of this "solemn sentimentality", stories told "in the confessional first-person singular" in which "a kind of applied psychology has taken over story-telling, coating it and obscuring the core".

That seed of an idea germinates in The Pages, a curious and intriguing novel of contraries, whose central theme is the opposition between philosophy and psychology, and which is extremely wary of sentimentality and confessionalism. It begins with two women in their 40s, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, driving out of Sydney to a remote sheep farm in New South Wales on a mission quite as odd as the planting of every known species of eucalyptus.

Erica, the philosopher, is going to assess the work of a dead man called Wesley Antill. Thirty years earlier, Antill quarrelled with his father, left his brother and sister on the sheep farm, ran away to Sydney and developed an interest in philosophy as "an intricate word-model of the world". Meanwhile, he worked as a hospital porter (one of the novel's best sequences)...#65279; and spent years wandering through European cities, "thought-thinking", until events turned him homewards. His brother and sister agreed to let him write his philosophy in the woolshed while they ran the farm. Here, living in puritan simplicity, he tried to invent a new philosophy, a new "theory of the emotions". Then he died, and his will requested that his work be published out of estate costs. The family lawyer (a nice Dickensian character) has appointed Erica to see if there is any value in "the pages", Wesley's unfinished life's work.

Erica, a reserved, attentive, orderly woman, is travelling with her friend Sophie, a narcissistic, importunate, sexy psychoanalyst, who is unaware that her friend is having an affair with her father, with whom Sophie is obsessed. The temperamental opposition between the two women is also a theoretical opposition between philosophy's impersonality and psychiatry's subjectivity. But it is unevenly balanced because Sophie is given such silly things to say. The imbalance is driven home by some bad-tempered riffs on the self-obsession and complacency of psychiatry and its (female) devotees.

The story of their drive into the pastoral landscape, of their meeting with the interesting Antills, of Erica's baffling encounter with Wesley's hieroglyphic "pages", of the crisis between the two friends and the landscape's gradually increasing influence over the city visitors is intercut with the history of Wesley's life. This moves from third-person narrative to first-person memoir to the notes on the "pages" that Erica - and we - are trying to understand.

So the pages we are reading make a commentary on different kinds of narrative, different ways of thinking about the world. Wesley's story begins with the difficulty of being a philosopher in Australia. Doesn't philosophy, this self-educated oddball asks himself, require old, dark countries, rather than a country of wide spaces, cloudless skies and "not enough history"? And doesn't it require travel, meetings, accidents, so that data from observation can be built up? Wesley's picaresque encounters are for a time, he thinks, his philosophic education. But the real events of his life - deaths, love, betrayal - in which he displays staggering emotional incompetence, eventually suggest that a better means of "thought-thinking" might be to go home and stay put. Wandering had been an evasion. Meanwhile, the world is still out there, impervious and resistant: "What possible dent could philosophy make on the fact of existence?"

It is hard to tell if this intellectual bildungsroman, in itself absorbing, is intended as a joke. I was in two minds as to whether Wesley Antill is meant to be a genius, a kind of Australian Wittgenstein, or a self-deluding, grandiose eccentric. The tone of Bail's oblique, demanding, intelligent, sardonic work reminds me of JM Coetzee's cryptic narratives, where the reader is never sure how far to invest in the characters. What is clear, though, are the oppositions that drive the novel along, between rural and urban, restraint and emotion, light and dark, picaresque travels and rooted pastoralism, Europe and Australia, objective and confessional narratives, order and turmoil.

These oppositions begin to break down interestingly. The self-controlled Erica gets lost in the bush and has to be rescued. Philosophy, at first so emphatically contrasted with subjective psychoanalysis, ends up taking the form of an autobiography. An (unidentified) quotation from Nietzsche hangs above Wesley's desk, saying that philosophy is "a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir".

Murray Bail plays a laconic, self-concealing game, cunningly luring the reader in to his interlinked stories. The Pages is not an easy or open book, but it is an oddly compelling one. The spell is most powerfully cast in the brilliant quiet skill of the writing, which can make the world come alive on the page, as in this startling, one-paragraph storm: "A dark mass rushing across the sky towards them, gathering above the roof, where it paused, then cracked open, a thunderous splitting apart, echoing, and again close; making them jump ... Simultaneously, lightning exposed them to windows, the way celebrities under siege in hotels are flash-photographed from the garden beds. By then it was raining. It was coming down. Tons of nails or wheat or gravel hitting the tin roof, pipes and gutters overflowing, while the thunder continued but moving away." After all, perhaps, it is fiction that does best what this philosopher is trying for, to grasp "what he saw before him, ordinary objects", to "fit words only to what can be seen".

· Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wharton is published by Vintage.