Alex Miller - Lovesong | Damian Kelleher

Sunday, May 9, 2010 — Damian Kelleher

Alex Miller - Lovesong

Lovesong, Australian author Alex Miller's 9th novel, is very much the work of a novelist who had found the material with which to create his masterpiece. Previous recent efforts by Miller, seen in the reflection of Lovesong, seem very much drafts preparing for the fully realised whole. This is a sensitive novel delicately told, one that understands the loneliness of living and the complexity that comes from sharing your life with another.

Lovesong opens with an ageing author uncomfortable with his decision to retire from writing. Reg admits to himself that 'retiring', for a writer, is an oxymoron; the creation of character and plot seems to unfurl from ordinary situations, and he has become particularly enamoured with the couple running the new bakery in his area. The woman is dark-skinned, perhaps from Africa, and he finds her beautiful.

She was in her early forties, perhaps forty-three or -four. She was dark and very beautiful, North African probably. But what impressed me even more than her physical beauty was her self-possession. I was reminded of the courtesy once regularly encountered among the Spanish, particularly among the Madrileños, a reserved respect that speaks of a belief in the dignity of humanity; a quality rarely encountered in Madrid these days, and then only among the elderly.

But it is the husband, John, with whom Reg strikes up a friendship. Reg is older, but the two share an understanding born from their relationship with books and solitude. Over a series of increasingly lengthy and intimate conversations, John reveals his initial courtship with his wife, their time together in Paris, and the reason for their living in Australia.

Sabiha was born and raised in Tunisia, but she dreams of larger things than the quiet family life of her parents, and soon emigrates to Paris to work with her Aunt in the cafe she owns. John is an Australian in Europe for a while, engaged in that common past-time of young Australians of traveling to the old world to discover the roots they seem unable to find at home. He wanders into Sabiha's cafe and falls instantly in love. Sabiha does too, but her love stems from the exoticism of John's Australianness, and her belief that he can provide her with a child. For Sabiha,

To sit with her father and her little daughter in the courtyard under the pomegranate tree, the three of them together, this was the beautiful dream Sabiha carried with her everywhere. It was her comforter. She was sure the day would come when it would become a reality.

They fall in love, marry, and then time passes. Sometimes it passes too quickly – Miller glosses over much, and it is difficult to believe that so little changes over the decades – but generally the story focuses on the development of John and Sabiha's internal lives at the expense of anything external. The couple, we discover, cannot conceive, and this has a constrictive effect upon their relationship.

When her childlessness persisted, and no cause for it could be found, Sabiha had begun to feel as if a wall of indifference was being erected around her, cruelly cutting her off from the purpose of her existence, and she asked herself if she was being punished for a crime she had not committed. The injustice of her childlessness burned in her every day. What had she done to deserve it? Her life had surely been blameless. Eventually they had stopped talking with each other about their childlessness. It was too painful. But although she never spoke of it, Sabiha's determination to bring her little girl into the world had remained as strong as ever.

The strength of this novel is not its plot, but the complexity and depth of the two primary characters. Sabiha is the focus of John's remembering, and there is very much the sense that, by telling his story to Reg, he is attempting to understand the wife with whom he has drifted apart. Sabiha's obsession becomes her downfall, and as the years continue without a child, so too does Sabiha's willingness to perform acts she would had never even considered when first falling in love. Miller possesses a rare sensitivity in his ability to show Sabiha as a fully faceted character, and the reader's sympathy is retained throughout the ups and downs. And indeed, it is impressive how much the reader is able to understand and sympathise with Sabiha when she performs acts generally considered unconscionable. We can't condemn Sabiha because we understand her, and we understand her thanks to the strength of Miller's writing, and his command of the characters.

We learn of John through his meetings with Reg, which means we understand one lonely man through the lens of another lonely man. This makes John something of a cipher, a symbol rather than a person. This would seem to contradict the comment above about John's depth, but as the novel progresses the strength of Sabiha is reflected from the strength of John as an individual. John is a weaker character, and suffers from the weak man's realisation of a life lived poorly. He visited Paris as a young man full of dreams, and left with the broken dreams of middle-age. He doesn't blame Sabiha, which is something we can understand that he would do, but cannot understand for ourselves. Sabiha is such a deep character, but she has the depth of a calm ocean. There's a lot happening underneath the surface, but nothing at all on top. John, though, is passive at the top, bottom, and all through the middle, leaving Sabiha to think that,

His loyalty bound him to her, his calm unquestioning loyalty. His love, his quiet decency, the modesty of his self-belief, and of course his unfailing, maddening, infinite patience and goodwill; with her, with his life, even with the wine merchant.

On paper, a loyal, calm, quiet, loving husband is a wonderful thing. In reality, something of a bore. Sabiha sometimes wonders if her husband's passivity is the cause of her childlessness, but really she spends most of her time thinking about herself. She is an astonishingly insular character, a world unto herself, and she sees her actions as noble and positive to herself, even when they have horrible consequences.

At early points in the novel Miller cheats the reader, and this is a real shame. The courting of Sabiha and John is skipped over between Parts I and II, but then the elapsed two years are remembered when needed by the story. This allows Miller to pretty much do whatever he likes in terms of creating scenes to fit the current emotional state of the character, which comes across as too artificial when compared with the natural progression of the first part. In addition, it forces Miller to engage in lengthy and unwieldy sentences of exposition simply to get the reader up to speed – really showing these sequences would involve pages and pages, and clearly Miller isn't interested. Why, then, are we?

These sections are awkward, and, thanks to Miller's style, feel like intrusions when they should smoothly integrate. So, we have a number of memories that begin with sentences such as “She found herself thinking...” and “...made Sahiba think of the day John...” and so forth. In a novel most often so thoughtfully constructed, and progressing forward in time with measured steps, these interruptions are the nails and joins of the book's scaffolding, and are as ugly here as they would be if they were still attached to a completed building.

But these are minor quibbles. If a novel takes a while to gather up steam, so be it. A weakness, sure, but nothing overly damaging. Because the novel relies so little on plot and so much on character, the beginning stages, which are by necessity concerned with plot, are the weakest, and again once the novel begins winding down. The middle section, with its examination of Sabiha and her desires, is consistently empathetic and marvellously sensitive to the emotions of the female heart.

Reg, as the weary author, is very much a framing device, and it is interesting to watch the twin stories develop. While we learn of John and Sabiha, we also discover pieces of Reg's past and his current situation with his daughter, who is forty and seems unable to leave the nest to live her own life. Again, Reg is a framing device, but the device works well enough. Reg uses John's story as a springboard to examine his own, and it is remarkable how different Miller manages to make these sections in tone and style, while still retaining a coherent whole. Reg's sections have a lot of dialogue, and Reg himself is clever, literary, and likes to make (terrible) jokes. This juxtaposes well with Sabiha, where there is barely any dialogue, and much of what happens is internal. Reg is sadder than the couple, though, and what's more his sadness is less tangible than theirs. There is a sense he lives only partly within the real world, and that the stories he creates is where he is truly alive. Considering this, when we also take into account Sabiha's belief that,

Men, she said to herself, are not like women. Their aloneness is in their souls. In their deepest place, men remain solitary all their lives. No matter how well loved they know themselves to be by a woman, men are always on their own. We never touch them in the place of their solitariness. John is alone now, lying here beside me sleeping. And when he reads his books, then he is also alone. He looks in those old dead books for the answer to his own aloneness, seeking a confirmation of his solitariness in the thoughts of other men, hoping to hear in their thoughts an echo of his own deepest aloneness.

We come to the interesting realisation that perhaps Reg and Sabiha would understand one another in a way that Sabiha and John never could. Reg, we suspect, knows this, and its why, throughout the novel, he thinks fondly of her and perhaps even, without really interacting with her at all beyond John's memories, develops feelings for her.

It's curious that John and Sabiha both have rich, complex inner lives, but their conversations with each other remain on a superficial level. It's all 'I love you' and 'I'm sorry', with little in between. We don't get a sense that the two are capable of conducting a conversation which would truly lay bare their innermost feelings, the very same feelings which are causing them both such grief. In this, Miller utilises his primary themes of exile and isolation. Sabiha and John, we are often reminded, are both exotic to France, which is in itself exotic to the writer, and most likely the reader. They speak to each other in a language not their own, and neither knows the families and friends of the other's past. They live in the home of dead people, and work in a cafe that never properly becomes their own. They are always separate from themselves and their true lives, which is why they do not communicate with one another, and why they must – must because of circumstance but also from choice – develop these strong inner dialogues.

Miller's Lovesong is a novel that works because Sabiha is such a well realised character. In addition to this, Lovesong deals with themes common to his others novel – art, solitude, the inability to accept reality at the expense of the ideal – and these, too, are handled well. Lovesong is one of six novels to be shortlisted for 2010's Miles Franklin Literary Award, and it is the first of the six I have read. Too early to say it is a front-runner? Perhaps, but I'm not going to let that stop me. A wondeful novel, a pleasure to read, and an impressive capstone to a long literary career.

Author	Alex Miller
Title	Lovesong
Nationality	Australian
Publisher	Allen & Unwin
Published	2009 (English)
Pages	354
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Fishpond (AU)

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