Dauntingly gifted shaper of stories

FICTION: LovesongBy Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin, 354pp £12.99

A WRITER convinced that his final story has been written, and his life’s job is done, seems resigned to the role of onlooker as his divorced daughter nosedives into another emotional disaster. Except that Ken cares and has a good relationship, based largely on humour, with Clare, the daughter, who has moved back in with him, is successful, has money yet is incapable of remembering to buy milk. It is the lack of that milk, when he arrives home to Australia from Venice, that prompts a harsh word.

But there is far more than absent milk on Ken’s mind. He has his memories, his wife is dead and, for him, the once-familiar neighbourhood is a changing place.

Just when he is wondering if he should have stayed in Venice – “I hadn’t yet decided whether I was glad to be home or was regretting not staying on in Venice for another month or two. Or for a year or two. Or forever” – when he notices that the dry-cleaner’s has become a bakery.

British by birth but Australian by inclination, and author of Conditions of Faith(2000) and Journey to the Stone Country(2002), Alex Miller is one of Australia's finest writers, worthy to stand equal with the great David Malouf. He establishes this novel effortlessly through the narrative voice of a man whose views on life instantly strike the reader as vital. Ken is a thinker; he knows all about the grey areas, he is sympathetic and he possesses that special quality, curiosity. He wants to find out more, as does the reader.

Lovesongis a chance book. Miller sets out to demonstrate what happens when a seed is planted in a writer's mind. Whereas the nonwriter may concede that something is interesting and moves on, the writer is a detective, intent on all the pieces. The enduring complexity of his previous novel, Landscape of Farewell (2007), an artistic leave-taking of sorts, has been set aside here in a candid story that announces itself through the sadness in a woman's eyes – "a hint of some ancient buried sorrow there. And on my way home I began to wonder about her story". And so a novel evolves. Miller has the elusive gift of balancing the ordinary with the profound. This enables him to make full use of his lightness of touch; his sentences glide, his tone is conversational yet he is ever alert to the sublime moment.

In this novel he makes effective use of Clare, busy and preoccupied with her romantic future. When Ken asks about the people running the new pastry shop, she announces that the man is a schoolteacher. Ken assesses her response “as if this meant they couldn’t possibly be interesting, and went on reading her paper. I added some thought or other about the possibility of a simple love story between them, this Aussie bloke and his exotic bride. Clare didn’t look up from her paper, but said with that quiet conviction of hers, ‘Love’s never simple. You know that, Dad.’ She was right of course. I did know it. Only too well. So did she”.

The everyday, such as Ken’s domestic exchanges with Clare, and his curiosity about the bakery owners, is well handled. Ken responds to the good humour that thrives in the shop, with its old-world grace. He then begins to watch “the Aussie bloke”, the schoolteacher, and the little girl, the couple’s child. Ken’s imagination begins to operate; he can’t help speculating. “He seemed more like an artisan than a teacher to me; not a workman but a craftsman of some kind. Perhaps a woodworker. A musical-instrument maker would not have surprised me. I could imagine the harpsichord his hands might lovingly fashion for his beautiful wife.”

Eventually they meet at a swimming pool. This time the man, previously so remote, is friendly, and he invites a delighted Ken to join him for coffee. The little girl is having a swimming lesson. For the narrator, watching the man, John Pattterner and his child, reminds him of his younger self when he was minding his own daughter.

All the while Miller is drawing the reader in and also describing how a friendship is born. Ken is patient; he asks no questions; he waits. “Slowly at first, hesitantly, little by little, he began to tell me their story. The story of himself and his wife, Sabiha, the beautiful woman from Tunisia whom he had married in Paris when he was a young man and she was little more than a girl. And the beautiful and terrible story of their little daughter Houria.”

In common with the best writers Miller tells us everything and very little. His art then begins to shape what will become the narrative. Central to this is the tension at work in Ken. He is a listener, but he is also a writer who had decided to stop writing. “My last novel was always going to be my last novel. I’d had enough.”

Enough of what? Neither Ken nor Miller addresses this, and it is intriguing that, although the story of the schoolteacher and his tormented wife takes over, the reader never loses sight of, or interest in, Ken the narrator, a man who recalls once being woken by his wife to discover a cockroach by their bed. “It waved its feelers at me like an alien reading my mind.”

Lovesongis, as its title implies, a love story, and is as shocking and as sad as love stories often are. It is also a confession of sorts. Ken leads us through the story of a man and a woman caught by circumstances, at first of loyalty and, ultimately, of betrayal and guilt. In many ways it is a study of longing and the desperation created by such longing. The flashback sequences to an earlier life in Paris shared by the then younger couple are gracefully imagined by Ken, a professional storyteller who never quite becomes a mere voyeur. There is a wonderful irony as the novel concludes with the writer having told the story, while the man who has lived it is also attempting to write it.

Miller’s latest, and with luck, not final work not only beguiles as a wry, tender tale but will also remind his admirers, and alert his new readers to, how dauntingly gifted he is at taking an image and shaping a story.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times