In Journey to the End of Time, Alex Miller contemplates the mysterious gift of story
- Written by Kieran Dolin, Professor, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia
Alex Miller is one of Australia’s most distinguished writers. He is the author of 14 novels and the winner of many literary prizes, including two Miles Franklin awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, though he has never gained the high public profile of, for example, Tom Keneally or Kate Grenville.
His latest book, Journey to the End of Time, is a collection of stories, essays, memoirs and poems that explore the connections between Miller’s art and his life. It has been beautifully curated by his wife Stephanie Miller to bring out some of the sources of his inspiration, his creative process and his artistic values.
Fittingly, the title essay recalls the first encounter between Alex and Stephanie (it seems right to use first names in this instance). Love, family and friendship are recurrent themes throughout the book.
Review: Journey to the End of Time: Writing and Memoir, Artists and Friends – Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)
Two earlier collections, The Simplest Words: A Storyteller’s Journey (2015) and A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World (2023), offered different perspectives on Miller’s life and how it has fed into his writing. The first included excerpts from his novels, along with discussions of their origins. The second drew on diaries and letters to provide a private account of the long search for his material and the quest to become a published writer.
In Journey to the End of Time, childhood memory and adult friendships form running threads. This autobiographical focus is uniquely combined with Miller’s mature reflections on the transformation of life experience into art, and the interaction of reality, imagination and craft that may yield deeper, personal truths.
The book is divided into five parts: Writing and Memoir, Writers and Storytellers, Art and Artists, Fiction, and Poetry. Each is an integral component of a structurally balanced whole.
The deeply moving episodes of memoir, which open the volume, are matched in the final sections with avowedly fictional stories involving Miller and some friends, which further explore issues arising out of his life. Meanwhile, in the middle sections of the book, ideas about memory and history, and the power of narrative and images, are elaborated in a group of essays and reviews of other writers and artists, including Jacob Rosenberg, Janine Burke, Rick Amor, John Wolseley and Sarah Ormonde. These provide a reflective accompaniment for the stories that follow.
Empathetic imagination
Miller published his first novels in the 1980s, the heyday of playful and labyrinthine fictions that flaunted their fictionality, of “beautiful lies” and radical experiments with narrative form.
Yet, as he explains in the essay Dreams and Illusions, Miller was drawn to an earlier form of storytelling that created its effects through a “direct simplicity of style”. Works by Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Anton Chekhov and others modelled the possibilities of this approach.
Such a style places a premium on clarity, but also relies on implication, leaving readers room to “exercise their own imagination”, thereby investing in the fictional world. Miller explains this approach in an author’s note to his early novel, The Tivington Nott:
As a novelist, I have not been so much a liar as a rearranger of facts. That is the kind of writer I am. The purely imaginary has never interested me as much as the actualities of our daily lives, and it is of these that I have written.
He goes on to record that many of the events and characters in his novels are drawn from his life or the lives of people he has known. This practice developed out of a suggestion from his friend, the Holocaust survivor Max Blatt, when Miller was a young man struggling to find his material: “Why don’t you write about something you love?”
Sidney Nolan, whose images of the outback first inspired Miller’s interest in Australia, is valued as “one of the few non-Indigenous Australian artists to have established a style uniquely his own”. He is a reference point in several essays across this collection.
Journey to the End of Time is a celebration of all forms of love – romantic love, friendship, parental and filial attachment, compassion for others. In Old Age, Love and Death, Miller acknowledges a darker side to these gifts, notably “the torment of love” and the death of old friends. While this essay inevitably has an elegiac tone, it also insists that friends who have “passed on to dwell in the spirit world remain within us”.
The final work in Journey to the End of Time, titled On Writing, is a free-verse coda, bringing together the book’s many themes. In it, Miller speaks of writing as
a migration away from the familiar into an unknownthat will become my familiar
The ethos that shines through this remarkable collection is, to quote Simone de Beauvoir, one of “devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, […] and to intellectual and creative work”. I strongly recommend it.
Authors: Kieran Dolin, Professor, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia
Hashtag.net.au
