by Alex Miller
All of Alex Miller’s novels have been critically acclaimed and have won or been shortlisted in all of the major Australian literary awards. He is twice winner of Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for The Ancestor Game. In 2015, The Simplest Words, Alex Miller’s first collection of stories, memoir, commentary and poetry, was published to great acclaim.
Alex Miller is published internationally and his works have been widely translated.
www.alexmiller.com.au
Also by Alex Miller
The Simplest Words
Coal Creek
Autumn Laing
Lovesong
Landscape of Farewell
Prochownik’s Dream
Journey to the Stone Country
Conditions of Faith
The Sitters
The Ancestor Game
The Tivington Nott
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain
First published in 2017
Copyright © Alex Miller 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76029 734 3
eISBN 978 1 76063 983 9
Text design by Sandy Cull
Set by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover design: Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Cover photographs: Andrew Buay (landscape); David Whelan (wedge-tailed eagle)
PRAISE FOR
The Simplest Words
‘The Simplest Words contains a fine consideration of what the novel might be and what it might become…Most collections of this kind are interesting and useful reminders of the value of a writer of considerable literary standing. The Simplest Words is more powerful than that, because of Miller’s intense engagement with his subjects, and because Stephanie Miller has chosen pieces that speak to one another, accounting, in a way, for one of our most original, engagingly vehement and expansive writers.’
—Brenda Walker, Australian Book Review
‘This is a rich, generous compilation that enticingly refracts our perceptions of one of Australia’s finest novelists.’
—Peter Pierce, The Saturday Age
‘This is a collection by one of Australia’s most astute and reflective writers…His writing has a luminous quality that sings off the page and whether he is writing on family, friendship, memory or just life, he engages with the reader, involving them in his orbit. This is a work to dip in and out of and will never disappoint.’
—Helen Caples and Martin Stevenson, Launceston Examiner
PRAISE FOR
Coal Creek
‘Miller’s voice is never more pure or lovely than when he channels it through an instrument as artless as Bobby…The intelligence of the author haunts the novel, like an atmosphere.’
—Geordie Williamson, The Monthly
‘Miller has been a master of visceral description from as long ago as the first novel he published, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain…Finding out what happened is a pleasure waiting for Miller’s readers.’
—Weekend Australian
‘Because of this subdued mode of storytelling, the tension mounts gradually and when tragedy strikes it is truly, hideously, mesmerising…an evocative and moving novel of the Australian bush.’
—Books and Publishing
‘Coal Creek is a story of friendship, love, loyalty and the consequences of mistrust set against Miller’s exquisite depictions of the country of the Queensland highlands.’
—Books and Arts Daily
‘The book is full of tension which drips off the page.’
—ABC Central Victoria
PRAISE FOR
Autumn Laing
‘in many respects Miller’s best yet…a penetrating and moving examination of long-dead dreams and the ravages of growing old.’
—Times Literary Supplement
‘A beautiful book.’
—Irish Times
‘Miller’s prose is so simply wrought it almost disguises its sophistication…The result transforms one woman’s dying words into pure and living art.’
—Weekend Australian
‘a magisterial work…a compulsively readable tale.’
—Adelaide Advertiser
‘Such riches. All of Alex Miller’s wisdom and experience—of art, of women and what drives them, of writing, of men and their ambitions—and every mirage and undulation of the Australian landscape are here, transmuted into rare and radiant fiction. An indispensable novel.’
—Australian Book Review
‘That Alex Miller in a seemingly effortless fashion is able to gouge out the innermost recesses of the artistic soul in his latest novel, Autumn Laing, speaks volumes about the command he has of his craft and the insights that a lifetime of wrestling with his own creative impulses has brought. Miller has invested this story of art and passion with his own touch of genius and it is, without question, a triumph of a novel.’
—Canberra Times, Panorama
‘Miller has fun with his cast of characters and humour, while black, ripples through the narrative, leavening Autumn’s more corrosive judgements and insights. Miller engages so fully with his female characters that divisions between the sexes seem to melt away and all stand culpable, vulnerable, human on equal ground. Miller is also adept at taking abstract concepts—about art or society—and securing them in the convincing form of his complex, unpredictable characters and their vivid interior monologues.’
—The Monthly
‘Few writers have Miller’s ability to create tension of this depth out of old timbers such as guilt, jealousy, selfishness, betrayal, passion and vision. Autumn Laing is more than just beautifully crafted. It is inhabited by characters whose reality challenges our own.’
—Saturday Age, Life & Style
‘Miller’s long honing of the craft of his fiction has never been seen to better advantage than in Autumn Laing.’
—Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum
‘Nowhere in Miller’s work has the drama of character been so well synthesised with the drama of ideas. Nowhere else have his characters drunk ideas like wine and exhaled them like cigarette smoke, a philosophical questing indistinguishable from defiant bohemian excess.’
—Weekend Australian, Review
‘It’s a tale of love, of longing, of creation and of a Melbourne recently past. Ambitious, hypnotic and deeply moving.’
—Sunday Telegraph, Insider
‘Indeed, fine balances are struck throughout the work. Conservatism and modernism, aesthetics and ethics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, established class structures and creative aristocracy: each of these conflicting forces unfold organically through the social interactions and the rhetorical back-and-forth that mark the Laings’ convivial artists’ parties…Miller’s prose is so simply wrought
it almost disguises its sophistication. Yet we feel the soft impress of the Anglo-American modernists on his sentences; the fealty he shows to the great 19th-century realists when building the inner lives of his women and men. Like Dante, a voice that was not Miller’s own has entered his breast and breathes there. The result transforms one woman’s dying words into pure and living art.’
—Weekend Australian, Review
‘Autumn Laing is a true triumph.’
—Sunday Herald Sun
‘Autumn Laing is a magisterial work, multi-award-winning Miller’s longest and most compelling and a triumphant culmination of a series of novels about art and the artist’s relationship to it…a compulsively readable tale.’
—Adelaide Advertiser
‘Miller’s language rises to his theme with a swaggering richness.’
—Sunday Age
PRAISE FOR
Lovesong
‘With Lovesong, one of our finest novelists has written perhaps his finest book…Lovesong explores, with compassionate attentiveness, the essential solitariness of people. Miller’s prose is plain, lucid, yet full of plangent resonance.’
—Age
‘Lovesong is a ravishing, psychologically compelling work from one of our best…’
—Courier Mail
‘Miller’s brilliant, moving novel captures exactly that sense of a storybuilt life—wonderful and terrifying in equal measure, stirring and abysmal, a world in which both heaven and earth remain present, yet stubbornly out of reach.’
—Sunday Age
‘Alex Miller’s novel Lovesong is a limpid and elegant study of the psychology of love and intimacy. The characterisation is captivating and the framing metafictional narrative skilfully constructed.’
—Australian Book Review
‘Lovesong is another triumph: lyrical, soothing and compelling. Miller enriches human fragility with literary beauty…’
—Newcastle Herald
‘The intertwining stories are told with gentleness, some humour, some tragedy and much sweetness. Miller is that rare writer who engages the intellect and the emotions simultaneously, with a creeping effect.’
—Bookseller & Publisher
‘With exceptional skill, Miller records the ebb and flow of emotion…Lovesong is a poignant tale of infidelity; but it is more than that. It is a manifesto for the novel, a tribute to the human rite of fiction with the novelist officiating.’
—Australian Literary Review
PRAISE FOR
Landscape of Farewell
‘The latest novel by the Australian master, so admired by other writers, and a work of subtle genius.’
—Sebastian Barry
‘Landscape of Farewell is a triumph.’
—Hilary McPhee
‘Alex Miller is a wonderful writer, one that Australia has been keeping secret from the rest of us for too long.’
—John Banville
‘Landscape of Farewell has a rare level of wisdom and profundity. Few writers since Joseph Conrad have had so fine an appreciation of the equivocations of the individual conscience and their relationship to the long processes of history…[It is] a very human story, passionately told.’
—Australian Book Review
‘As readers of his previous novels—The Ancestor Game, Prochownik’s Dream, Journey to the Stone Country—will know, Miller is keenly interested in inner lives. Landscape of Farewell continues his own quest, and in doing so, speaks to his reader at the deepest of levels. He juggles philosophical balls adroitly in prose pitched to an emotional perfection. Every action, every comma, is loaded with meaning. As one expects from the best fiction, the novel transforms the reader’s own inner life. Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, it is only a matter of time before Miller wins a Nobel. No Australian has written at this pitch since Patrick White. Indeed, some critics are comparing him with Joseph Conrad.’
—Daily News, New Zealand
PRAISE FOR
Prochownik’s Dream
‘Assured and intense…truly gripping…This is a thoroughly engrossing piece of writing about the process of making art, a revelatory transformation in fact.’
—Australian Bookseller & Publisher
‘With this searing, honest and exhilarating study of the inner life of an artist, Alex Miller has created another masterpiece.’
—Good Reading
PRAISE FOR
Journey to the Stone Country
‘The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for.’
—Tim Winton
‘A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line.’
—Nicholas Shakespeare, author of The Dancer Upstairs
PRAISE FOR
Conditions of Faith
‘This is an amazing book. The reader can’t help but offer up a prayerful thank you: Thank you, God, that human beings still have the audacity to write like this.’
—Washington Post
‘I think we shall see few finer or richer novels this year…a singular achievement.’
—Andrew Riemer, Australian Book Review
PRAISE FOR
The Ancestor Game
‘For pure delight, abandon the maze, and read for sensual pleasure. This is a gift of floors of lacquered Baltic pine, pearwood shelves and tea boxes. There is the perfume of the camphor laurel trees, coats made of the pelts of 18 grey foxes, and Victoria Tang’s horse. Smell the porridge and sour pickles, cross the cold wet slate courtyard flagstones. Remember chrysanthemums the deep rust color of an old fox’s scalp.’
—Sara Sanderson, The Indianapolis News
‘A major new novel of grand design and rich texture, a vast canvas of time and space, its gaze outward yet its vision intimate and intellectually abundant.’
—The Age
‘A dense, complex work that addresses the issues of cultural displacement, colonialism and the individual’s imaginative link to earlier generations…Extraordinary fictional portraits of China and Australia.’
—New York Times Book Review
‘one of the most engrossing books I’ve read in a long time.’
—Robert Dessaix
PRAISE FOR
The Sitters
‘Like Patrick White, Miller uses the painter to portray the ambivalence of art and the artist. In The Sitters is the brooding genius of light. Its presence is made manifest in Miller’s supple, painterly prose which layers words into textured moments.’
—Simon Hughes, Sunday Age
PRAISE FOR
The Tivington Nott
‘The Tivington Nott abounds in symbols to stir the subconscious. It is a rich study of place, both elegant and urgent.’
‘An extraordinarily gripping novel.’
—Melbourne Times
For Stephanie
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
PART TWO
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
; 54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
PART THREE
65
66
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART ONE
1
When I drove the twenty kilometres from my home to the prison it was a soft cloudless afternoon such as we often enjoy here before the summer heat arrives. Once I’d left the last houses of the town behind, the road wound through the low hills of the box-ironbark forest. The original native timber of the forest trees was harvested in the nineteenth century to fuel the steam engines of the goldmines that then flourished in the area. In the more than one hundred years since it was felled, the forest has regrown into a modified version of its native form. Each stump of what was once a single tree now supports several trunks, giving the impression of a uniform age to the trees, as if the forest had always been there just as I was seeing it that afternoon, timeless and undisturbed. But for some time, for years, after the tree-fellers left, there must have been a disheartening expanse of bare stumps. It was this image that remained with me as I drove on.
The road emerged from the forest and passed through the old township of Maldon. The modest mid-Victorian buildings on either side of the main street remain much as they were at the time the forest was felled. When goldmining ceased in the early part of the twentieth century, the town, like the forest, was more or less abandoned. Two or three kilometres beyond the town I crested a hill and a view of extensive grasslands opened out in front of me. The treeless savannah was interrupted here and there by the bold forms of rounded hills topped with enormous granite boulders. From a distance these grey, lichen-adorned boulders looked like shaggy prehistoric beasts at rest, the progress of their journey arrested by some mysterious instinct.
A large green sign advertised the prison. I didn’t want to arrive before the scheduled time of my talk, so I didn’t drive into the prison grounds yet but parked in the shade on the side of the road. I could see the prison through the roadside trees: a cluster of new buildings, low and neat, painted a pale shade of green. Until I was invited to speak to the members of the prison book club, I’d thought young male offenders were held there, as in the dreaded borstals of my childhood in London. Among us schoolboys the borstal had a fearsome reputation as a place where brutal older boys and vicious guards would tyrannise us. The idea of the place terrified us. The boys from among our number whose rebellious natures attracted the attention of the authorities and who were sent to borstal, we knew to be lost to us and to the small compass of our lives forever. I had no memory of any boy ever returning. I suppose they did return, or some of them surely did. Others, their temperament of rebellion confirmed by the brutality of the experience, no doubt moved on to prisons for adult men. We knew from an early age that the forces of the law were not for our protection but for the protection of property. And as we and our parents possessed no property that needed protecting, the only times we saw the police in our neighbourhood streets were when they came to arrest one of our fathers, usually on suspicion of stealing someone else’s property that they, the police, had failed to protect. The friendly English bobby was not a feature of our Council estate.