Hello again. It's Ruby Jones. Welcome back to another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from two times Miles Franklin Award winning author Alex Miller, who's discussing his latest novel, The Deal. As always, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a bit more about the episode.
I'm Michael, Ruby Jones. How are you.
I'm well, Thank you so, Michael. Critically acclaimed writer Alex Miller has just released his fourteenth novel at the impressive age of eighty seven, So tell me a bit about his career so far.
Yeah, Ruby, I feel like we've said this a few times. I'm read this, but Alex Miller is a two time winner of the Miles Franklin Award. It is, you might not realize, quite a rare category and it's an indication of how long he's been a writer. Working at the peak of his career. His first book came out thirty seven years ago. It was called Watching the climbers on the mountain. But since then he's only gone from strength
to strength, awards, acclaim, great reviews. Just before he published his latest novel, which is the one you mentioned at the top, that's the deal, his wife, Stephanie Miller, unearthed hundreds of his old notepats, diaries, letters and put them
together in this collection called a Kind of Confession. I love books like this, you know, where you not only get an insight into the writer as a person, but you can if you follow the timelines, you can really get an insight into what was going on in their mind, in their life and their correspondence in the lead up to writing a book. If you love their output, then you go to the letters, you go to the archive, and you get a sense of I guess what you call the stories behind the books we love.
And so this new novel, it's actually returning to a story that he wrote about more than three decades ago. Is that right?
Yeah, that's right. So arguably miller most famous book, most celebrated book is a book called The Ancestor Game. Came out back in nineteen ninety two and it won the Miles Franklin Award. Got a lot of acclaim, and it centers around this character called Lang Su, who's an exiled
Chinese artist who's turned art dealer. Now, the thing is that Lang Sue was based on a real life friend of Alex Miller's, a guy called Alan o' hoy, and the pair met in the mid seventies and they had this kind of deep bond, And much of the Ancestor Game reads like Miller and his various characters Stephen, August, Gertrude, all trying to make sense of this puzzle of a
man in the work of fiction. Lang Zu survives and his kind of triumphant at the end of the book, But in real life, Alan o'hoy, the guy was based on, died by suicide. His grieving friend paid tribute on the page, immortalizing him for the Australian literary firmament. But now more than thirty years later, Alex Miller's gone back to the character, back to the fiction, and back to his late friend
and his new novel. The Deal is really interested in questions about how writers engage with the world around them. It's about artists, It's about Australian racism and marriage and parents and children. But more than anything, else, it's about giving Lang Su or Alan o'hoy, or even Alex Miller himself another go at laying out the truth.
Coming up. In just a moment, Alex Miller finally lets his friend die.
Alex Miller, are you a rereader of your own work?
No, I've never read one of my books from beginning to end. I've read chunks, bits and pieces of them and then sort of remember so much of what's going to happen, where it's going to go, and even sentences that I made up for Edmund to the end.
I ask about rereading your work because it seems to me the book that came out with your name on the front of it before the deal was a kind of confession, and it was a collaboration with your wife, Stephanie.
It was Stephanie who did it.
It was her project of unearthing your papers, your letters and compiling them in a way that tells a story of a writerly life and a body of work. How did you feel about that process? How was it to be confronted with your words of forty years ago and think about what they meant, what they said about you, and how you've changed.
How had I done it? I wouldn't have done it the way she did. She and Annette Barlow, my publisher, were in it together, and it took a long time for them to put it all together. I'm an unbelievable amount of material. For years since I can remember, I've kept letters, and then of course when email came in, I kept what I thought it was significant responses for and me, so that the letters have a place, and I love writing letters. I wouldn't have put in the
stuff that Steph put in. She went through to the earliest, went through all my diaries, every diary for bloody years, and all the notebooks, piles of notebooks. I mean a lot of those notebooks just had things like dentists three PM, you know, stuff like that in them about them.
But that's a good name for a future book about.
The dentist three pm root canal. Yeah, So I mean no, I was very busy while she was doing it, writing another book. I can't remember what the book was. It may have even been this one the deal, but I didn't read it. I had no input to it. I attempted to have an input to it at one point by saying, looking at what had been done at a fairly late stage, and I said, well, all my my essays on art have been left out. There's nothing in there to indicate really my lifetime interest in art. And
Steph said that's for another collection. We've kept them out on purpose. I said, okay, so yeah, it was absolutely STEP's job.
Smart woman.
Yeah, she's my first editor, and she'll save a book from being discarded altogether and see something else in it that it needs rearranging, or the perspective's a bit wrong.
That's what the trouble is.
That's why you're talking about giving it up and doing something else. And it again shines a light for me on the work that's a long way from finished.
It seems directly relevant to me to the deal, because the deal is partly an act of reckoning with one of your most celebrated works book of many years ago. And there is a letter that you send your Chinese translator in a kind of confession, where you offer a
forward for the Chinese edition of The Ancestor Game. I really I can't remember that, and it begins I began to work on The Ancestor Game in order to try to understand the tragic death of a dear friend the man on whom the hero of this book is based. Langzu was a real person. He was my friend. He was an Australian Chinese artist who had lived his entire life outside China. He failed to achieve recognition as an artist in Australia and his life came to seem to
him to be more and more pointless as time went on. Eventually, at the age of fifty, he shot himself.
So really it had been revealed.
I've forgotten that was in there all that I've.
Written only for the Chinese forward of the book, but you laid it out there very clearly. That engine for the Ancestor.
Game, but also for this book.
Yeah, and for this book.
Because in the Ancestor Game he doesn't die.
So I want to begin with the ancest again before we get to the deal and by what motivated you as a writer to tell his story and what motivated the decision to let him live?
Yeah, really good questions that I've asked myself many times, and there are many different answers to them, depending at what stage of life you're at. For the first two or three years after he shot himself, I was very upset about it and quite depressed. Often and if I had a few drinks in the evening, I'd start lamenting his death, which made me angry and disappointed and a number of confused emotions for quite a long time. And Steph finally said, well, why don't you write a book
about him? And I knew immediately that she was right, I should do it. So yeah, I mean to clear your mind in a sense, to get it over, to deal with it. And that book what didn't become the deal, It didn't become.
The real life.
It became a real and an imaginary life. And it took me back into Chinese history in Australia, and it brought me to the realization that if you're Chinese, you're never going to be an icsy bloke. If you're Irish or English or a German migrant you can be a nussy bloke, not if you're Chinese.
It began to sink into me that that was the case.
And of course I also read in great depth the history in Australia, the published history in Australia of anti Chinese feeling and racism, which ran deep. There was even a I mean, it hasn't hasn't gone away if you're Chinese you must come across it from time to time. And I was talking to Alice Pung the other day and she and I are friends. She came for lunch and we were talking about it, and she just said, yeah, you know, it's normal for it to be in her life,
the lives of her friends who are Asians. And one of the reviews a very good review of the deal actually and it was lovely to get it in the Australian Book Review, and in that the reviewer, who has nothing negative to say about the book said, it's a stretch for me to believe that this or you didn't quite say to believe, but it's a stretch for me that this Chinese drunk has valued so highly by dealers
and auctioneers in the art world in Melbourne. Anybody who was involved in the art world in Melbourne in the seventies and eighties knew Lang Zu, they knew Alan o'hoy,
the man on whom he was based. I mean that was unconscious racism in the sense that if it had been a drunken German dealer or a drunken Ossie dealer, now I would have blinked an I it was Chinese dealer he was a secret dealer and a collector, and he was relied on by a lot of agents and also people in the business of auctioning paintings.
That anger and grief in the wake of his death. You know that, I understand that as an impulse to write, But what you're reckoning with the man.
You must look. I loved him, and as you know, if somebody who loved dies, they're with you forever.
They don't go away.
People like Alan Barry Reid really critically important people to me. Yeah, I mean a lot of people have gone into my books who are now did friends, people I loved and cared deeply about the truth of what they had lived, the truth of what they'd claimed those things are I
mean yeah to me. I mean Ray Gaetor always says I'm a searcher after truth, and I hadn't kind of realized that there was anything special until he said that, and I thought, oh, yeah, I am too, because that's what interests me, to get to the truth of the story. I mean the story in a sense, if you're a writer, you don't have.
This beginning of the story.
You don't have the middle of the story.
It's only when the end of the.
Story appears to you that you realize, oh my god, there's a story there.
I know.
When that began, you think, and then you've got the compass of the story.
If you like it. If you like it.
When we return, Alex shares why he had to return to the story of his friend and set the truth straight, and why he's no longer scared of death, We'll be right back. If seeing the shape of the story isn't clear until you get the end of the story, how different is telling a story when that end is death by suicide, when that end is at the hand of the person that you're writing about.
Well, writing the Deal wasn't the same as writing The Ancestor Game. It was a desire to tell the truth. Because when I wrote The Ancestor Game, people who'd known Allen wrote to me or rang me up and in those days left a message saying you brought him back and thanking me, Well, yeah, but he's dead.
He shot himself. That was the reality.
And as you just pointed out in that Book of Steps, I actually wrote about that to Professor Leo, who translates my stuff into Chinese. I think that writing this book Deal, it came simply in a sense, from a desire to the two things. I suppose one is that I'm continuing with a kind of autobiography because it's it all comes from friends and loved ones.
I'm concerned.
I did try and write about a person I disliked intensely once, and through trying to write about him, I began to like him and understand his motivation and have some sympathy with it. The real life bloke I still didn't like. But I find it very difficult to write about people I don't like.
You'd written him into someone you understood.
Yeah, Anyway, the reason I wrote The Deal was to bring a couple of things into perspective. One was the fact of my father as the good man before the war, and his gift to me of the simplicity of art, in that innocence of art as it can be, and the corruption of art which happens in the book, with the substitution of paintings and recognition of things and all that.
And in the end the signature. I mean, neither he nor I put the signature on that picture, but it was there, and it was sold in London for some enormous and.
The heart of the Deal is your surrogate if you like Andy, and I'm curious at times it's a picture of the writer as someone who is extractive of the people in their life. And it seems to me that if we understand this book partly through the lens of autobiography, you seem critical of your chosen profession.
It's the same in the Ancestor Game. I actually call the writer a parasite in the Ancestor Game because he is feeding off the material of his engaging main protagonist of a book that maybe he will write one day. So yes, he's kind of feeding off a relationship.
But both of us were. We were both.
Using each other, And you do have to ask, is there any friendship in which the two people don't use each other to some extent? I mean, I know they say, oh, he's a user or she's a user, and that's a derogatory term. But nevertheless, we do use or make use of friends in all sorts of ways, and they do of us too. We find we have been used and not unpleasant way.
If the Deal is partly about telling the truth of that relationship and of that time and that story, is it a stretch then to say that you feel that you weren't telling the truth in the ancest again.
Yeah, it's not a stretch. I suppose it's just the truth to say that I wasn't. I mean, the ancestor game is a lot of it is history making the point. I suppose that the Chinese or arrived twelve years after Melbourne was declared a settlement, and that they came before the gold, whereas, of course the story is normally that they came for the gold and then went home again, which is simply not true.
Maybe true of some people.
It's certainly true of English people who came out with money, significant amounts of money, and exploited land and sheep and cattle for a few years and then went back again to England. Lots of lots of them, and that was but that's not said about them.
Part of what works so beautifully in the deal and makes the way it recast the story so moving is the perspective of time and age, you know, and his voice and his story comes from from the other end of a lifetime, so much so that the book ends in the first person and his voice and in old age kind of looking back at this stuff. How important is that perspective of distance. I mean, I imagine the Alex Miller who wrote The Ancestor Game not only didn't
write The Deal then, but couldn't have that. It's something that you can only come to several decades on in your writing career.
Yeah, I mean, I've simplified things in as much as I'm able to in the last few books. I mean, I'm not capable of writing a great, big book anymore. I'm too old to take on a subject that requires a lot of research, and He's going to finish up being a sort of six hundred page book. So it's kind of in my interests anyway, to be much tighter and more disciplined about the way I.
Deliver a story.
So yeah, a kind of not a kind of confession. What was it called? A brief Affair and a Deal? I were both relatively short books compared to Ancestor Game, which is not huge, but still it's big in terms of its subject and its grasp of things, and it's historical reference and all that.
But the.
Deal runs from when I was a kid to now I'm what eighty seven, I'll be eighty eight next month December.
It's distressing to me, Alex, You're in better nick than I am.
And then you know, well I work at it.
Yeah, I work at it. Two, that's not having any and me of the same success you're having.
It's just luck.
But yeah, So the perspective that I now have on it, I think needs to be stated in this book because the guts of the book, the deal is a story that happened a long time ago. It's also the story of Stephanie and our meeting and having our first child and what that did to me. And for a lot of people, that's the most important part of the book. None of the reviewers so far has mentioned Australian racism as having any part to play in it, except Chinese people.
That is, it's the most important part of the book for them.
I'm so curious about whether the writer in their eighties is more comfortable letting their friend die on the page than the writer in their forties, you know, whether that or their fifties. You know, whether whether that distance allowed you to be truer this time around.
Yeah, I think that's probably an insight, of valuable insight. But you're not afraid of death when you're old. I mean, why be afraid of death when you're in your eighties. For Christ's sake, you should be dead and it will be soon. I used to call it, and I probably still do. People don't like it, of course, is the death zone. Someone turns eighty and they let me know a party, and so you're in the death zone now, and they say, oh fuck felks for Christ, cheer up, mate.
You might want to work on the messages you're writing cards, if that's what you're doing.
But that's when we die. We die in our eighties. Ninety percent of us die in our eighties. A few slip through to their nineties. Not too many are still being productive in any sort of serious way into their nineties. So that's another challenge yet to be faced. I mean, when you're forty five, you're scared of death. When you're fifty year scared of death, you think, oh fuck, I've got bloody cancer. Now you never think that.
At my age.
I've never give it a thought. I just look at Steph and I think, I hope you're okay when I'm gone, you.
Know, before I let you go, I just want to ask, just cut and ride for the record, if there's something that you want readers of the Deal to understand to take away and remember about your friend Allen. What would it?
No, people read their own book, and my books hopefully are open to readers to read their own book, so that a young person in Bowel will picked a book up and read it, and they'll read their own book. They won't notice the racism, or they will notice it, or they won't notice the innocence of art and the corruption of art as a possible dichotomy a subject, if you like. They might notice the falling in love on the bus, maybe that will be the main story for them.
Or the way a man talks to his daughter.
Yeah, that having children was the greatest of end of my life, and I think probably of many parents' lives. The event of having a child changed everything.
It humanized me.
Well. I concur with your other readers who think The Deal might be the finest thing you've done. It's a masterpiece and thrill to discover that you're still delivering masterpieces. And I'm excited for the next one.
Thanks for your churn vote.
It's an absolute pleasure. Great as ever to see you YouTube. Mike Alex Miller's latest book is The Deal. It's available at all good bookstores now.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. As always, if you want to dive further in to Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than seventy episodes in the archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.