What Book to Read?

I enjoyed this book very much when I read it shortly after it was published in 2002. When my book club chose it recently, I was interested to see how it would stand a second reading. The answer is very well – I still think it is brilliant. And it raises some very interesting issues for discussion.

Forty-two year old Melbourne academic historian Annabelle Küen arrives home one evening to find her husband Stephen has gone off with one of his students, leaving a self-justifying letter of explanation. Shocked and humiliated, she flees to Townsville in north Queensland to stay with Susan, a friend who does cultural heritage surveys. Annabelle has a connection with north Queensland; as a child, she lived on a cattle station there and still half owns the family home in Townsville. Out on a survey, she meets Susan’s colleague, Bo Rennie, a former stockman – a ‘ringer’ – and member of the local Jangga clan, who remembers Annabelle from when they were children. Both immediately feel a connection between them, and Bo is willing, even eager, to help Annette travel back into her past. But might they both find out more than they wish to know?

I find Miller’s writing immensely powerful. This power comes partly from his technical abilities – his capacity for description of the landscape, and his wonderful characterisation. I’ve never been to north Queensland, but he makes me see the poisoned boxwood forest and the bindi weed, the fragrant sandalwood and the rocks and ridges. I remarked in an earlier post about his 2009 book Lovesong that he has an almost uncanny ability to get inside the heads of people of a different gender and culture, in this case, a white woman and an Aboriginal man. Bo in particular is a brilliant creation; we learn about him from how he speaks, how he moves his hands, how he stands; there is no need of detailed physical description. These are characters that you can care deeply about; one reviewer says she worried for weeks about Bo’s cholesterol level – I worried about how much he smokes. On this reading I was a little less convinced by Annette; I thought that Miller allowed her to shrug off her life as an academic historian just a bit too easily. And I didn’t understand Arner’s role in the story at all. But these are minor quibbles.

The power of the writing also comes from the themes it deals with. These are complex and many layered. At the heart of the book is the relationship of people to land, which inevitably involves the question of the dispossession of Aboriginal people by white settlers. But the settlers had their own vision; how important is it to document or even preserve their heritage? How does it compare with the poverty and squalor in which some Aboriginal people now live? What is the range of modern responses to Aboriginal dispossession? Can Annabelle’s search for explanation and understanding ever be compatible with Bo’s sense that ‘There’s some things you know without knowing why you know them … And it don’t help to try explaining them’? Or are ‘the secret regions of the heart’ what matter most? Miller asks these questions, but leaves readers to make up their own minds. He is never didactic.

When I was reading about this book, I came across a comment by Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University. Professor Dixon is an expert on the work of Alex Miller, and has recently edited a collection of critical essays, The Novels of Alex Miller (2012), which I’ll eventually get round to reading. But his comment worried me. It was that Miller’s novels ‘are by and large accessible to the general reading public yet manifestly of high literary seriousness – substantial, technically masterly and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight’. It’s the ‘yet’ in the sentence that bothers me (though the ‘by and large’ is a bit iffy too). Dixon makes it seem that there are two classes of reader – the ‘general reader’, in which class I would definitely fit, and another class better able to appreciate the ‘high literary seriousness’ inherent in Miller’s work. If so, who are the readers in this class? The contributors to his critical study? Perhaps I’m being unfair here. Miller’s work is all the things Dixon says it is. But critical studies should help the general reader understand the technical aspects of how Miller writes – not be over their heads. And it seems to me that each reader will take from this book what is important to them, depending on their experience and sensibility, and that my book club of general readers is as capable of understanding the ‘intellectual and ethical weight’ of the work as anyone else. After all, in Miller’s own work, the instinctive act is valued just as much as the intellectual one.

The book won the Miles Franklin Award for 2003. You can read more about Alex Miller here.