Alex Miller writes about life and love with the eloquence and sensitivity that we’d expect from a novelist who’s won the Miles Franklin Award (twice), the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award (also twice) and was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature. His decades long literary career shows no signs of dwindling even in this his eighty-seventh year. 

His latest novel “A Brief Affair” has attracted critical attention, most of it positive. One exception was the review in ABR, in which the reviewer, Penny Russell, suggested that comments attributed to various characters on the subject of ageing and the futility of soldiering on when all our efforts inevitably lead to age, decay and death, came shrink-wrapped direct from “an ageing author’s heart“. All I can say is that when Penny Russell becomes an ageing author, I hope someone says that about her work. Surely one can write about ageing and death without necessarily having one foot in the grave. It’s hard not to see discriminatory intent in phrases that pepper the review, e.g. “betrays a shaky grasp of history“, “jarring discrepancies“, “carelessness“, “a creeping sense of banality“, “inconsequential“, etc. Miller, it’s implied, is well past his use by date, should lay aside his pen and take a seniors’ bus tour instead, preferably one where he could bone up on history. I, for one, don’t agree.  

It was Miller’s appearance at this year’s Adelaide Writers Week that sparked my interest in the book, which I read soon afterwards. There is also, I discovered, an online video recording of an event at the National Library of Australia where Miller talks at length with Tom Griffiths about the book, life, love and the writing process generally, which I found so fascinating I decided to write about it.

“A Brief Affair”, Miller’s thirteenth novel, takes its title, not from the one-night stand of its protagonist, Fran, but from an observation by another character that “life is a brief affair“.

Fran Egan is a disillusioned academic, who, on a trip to China takes a bus ride and finds herself seated next to a man who, she notices in sneaky glances, looks as “exotically seductive” as a Mongol warrior. Miller’s depiction of what follows is masterful. 

“At the next stop she turned and she did look at him … He gazed straight ahead. His features in profile were flat, powerful, his manner interior, and beautiful. She thought of a Mongol warrior. A horseman of the steppe. Exotically seductive. The thrill in her belly was delicious, secret, lovely. She hadn’t had that feeling for years. She was a young girl again. She had thought it was over. The bus moved on and, slowly, he turned his head and looked at her.”

Once the “horseman of the steppe” looks into her eyes and smiles, it’s all over.  As well as sending parts of her anatomy all a-flutter, he divulges that he too is an academic, and indeed had spent some time as a visiting professor in the small town in Victoria where she lives, even patronising the local pub, where a photograph of him with his Australian hosts is displayed above the bar. Coincidence in fiction is usually frowned upon, however in this case it was a matter of life being stranger than fiction.

In speaking at Writers Week, Miller revealed that this incident was taken from life. But it was he who was visiting China and sitting on a bus when a man who looked like “Genghis Khan’s son” sat next to him, a man so cruelly handsome that “you could hear the drums of war when you looked at him“. If he’d been a woman, Miller said, he’d have wanted to be seduced by this man. And this man had indeed visited Miller’s hometown as a visiting professor and patronised not the local pub, but a café called Togs, which you can visit next time you’re in Castlemaine.

Fran and her Oriental stud go on to spend the night together in a hotel, an episode which by mutual unspoken agreement will never be repeated, but one that will colour her thoughts and fantasies for the rest of the book. So much so that it sparks a midlife crisis in Fran that causes her to question everything, not least her long and happy marriage to Tom. Her sense of herself from then on becomes divided between who she’d been before China and the person she’s become since. 

Miller’s strength in this novel is his depiction of Fran. It’s a finely tuned and startlingly plausible dissection of a woman’s state of mind at midlife, that precipitous threshold, where youth begins to seem a faint memory and ageing as a real prospect can no longer be brushed aside. It’s also a time of reckoning, when women (and men too) look at where they are and measure it against where they’d hoped to be, often with enough dismay to provoke major life changes.

In an interview Miller said of his uncanny ability to get inside Fran’s head, “My sense of empathy with Fran, and my identification with her longing to explore her own inner world probably enabled me to write of her with sympathy. Much of Fran is based on myself.” An unexpected revelation, considering that it was Miller’s wife, an academic, who had worked at Sunbury Campus where part of the novel is set. The campus building was a converted lunatic asylum and it serves as the fictional setting for Fran’s place of work and crucially acts as the nexus for her coming to know the history of a former inmate of the asylum, Valerie Summers. 

Fran’s “blissful transgression” is not the only thing that haunts her. An unsettling feeling that the campus where she works is haunted begins to bother her. As Miller explained in the interview with Tom Griffiths, “the place is creepy“. There’s a sense there of the terrible things that happened, a “residue of unease, like a stain on old wallpaper“. 

The campus caretaker gives Fran a notebook which belonged to Valerie Summers, who had been incarcerated in Cell 16, a room which is now Fran’s office. Once Fran begins to read the notebook and Valerie Summers’s poetry, she becomes increasingly absorbed in Valerie’s life story. Her fascination with the woman and her work ultimately leads her out of her existential quagmire. She finds a way to redefine her life and resolve her disillusionment.

This development constitutes Fran’s transformation (always a necessary thing for a protagonist), but it’s also a testament to the power of writing to translate inchoate emotions into understanding, for both writer and reader.

Valerie writes in her journal “I began to write after I became a patient in the nut house. It was then that I discovered that facts are not the only truth. Our own private truth is elusive and hides from us. It is the truth the poets seek.”

Miller’s hand, ageing or otherwise, is clearly discernible here. In conversation he talks of history and fiction and describes something he calls “a poetic truth“, an analogy for the malleability of facts with which all writers must contend, whether writing novels or non-fiction. 

Miller quoted another writer who came up with a wonderful metaphor for writing historic fiction. It’s like being on a trampoline, he said, leaving the facts on the trampoline as you leap into the air of fiction. But you’ve got to remember to come back down again to the facts. Historic fiction must have a base of authenticity.

Another thing he said about reading that we tend to forget is that readers might be reading the same book but it’s different for each of them. (You only have to look at a few Goodreads reviews to see that.) In essence they each read a different book because they all bring their own lives to it and interpret it through the lens of their own experiences. There is no such thing, in other words, as the “common reader”.

Another aspect of Miller’s writing I really enjoy is the visually evocative nature of his prose. The landscape within which this story takes place is again integral, to the point that setting becomes as significant as character. 

Here’s just 0ne example of many:

“The landscape of field and farm was at peace. The rusted tin roof of the old stone cottage down the hill glistening with frost, a soft white mist lying along the creek flats below the house, the sound of the creek in the perfection of morning stillness.”

The importance of imagery in this novel is reflected in the cover, which is from a painting by David Moore, an Australian painter. He and Miller both live in the same region – the Victorian goldfields, a landscape with its own haunted history.

This book review seems to have taken on archeological scope, but as a fervent reader and writer, I love digging deeply into books. In this case it’s been a fruitful excavation.