journey to the end of time by Alex Miller

Alex Miller is an Australian author, originally from the UK, but who has spent his entire adult life putting Australia into words.

This is the third volume of what I was about to call his autobiography, but it is not as simple as that, more a piecing together of the writer’s life and inspiration from fragments of his own writing. This is best illustrated by the subtitles of all three volumes:

            the simplest words – a story teller’s journey (2015)

            a kind of confession – the writer’s private world (2023)

            journey to the end of time – writing and memoir, artists and friends (2026)

Each book has been selected and arranged by Miller’s wife, Stephanie. The fact that none of the titles contains a capital letter says a lot about Miller and his style. It is never pretentious, but speaks volumes about the everyday.

Two things that I would note about Alex Miller. The first is that all his books, fourteen novels, these three memoirs, and his biography of friend Max Blatt, are all highly autobiographical. They cover his move from England as a teenager to become an Australian stockman, through to his friendships with Aboriginal elders and Australian artists. The second observation is just what an incredible writer Miller is. He is a master of a simple sentence and has a wonderful ability to capture mood and place and bring them to life. Because his fiction so often draws on reality, his characters always ooze authenticity.

journey to the end of time is no exception. Each time we read another story about Miller’s childhood on a poor working-class council estate in south London, we see a little deeper into the events that shaped and made him. There is a section in the book that contains a few pieces of shorter fiction. I say shorter, two of the stories are twenty pages long, but these are some of the first shorter pieces of Miller’s work I have seen. They are collected from Australian press articles and literary journals. As always, they are excellent. The story called The Ride takes us back to his youth in south London and the construction of a bicycle out of old parts found on scrap piles around the post-war city. You can feel the pride of achievement and the sense of freedom the bicycle delivers. But then the story pivots into one of love and class as the young rider finds himself following a teenage girl whose new bicycle has proper gears and springs. All signs of wealthy parents. He follows her as far as the South coast, a trip of some 80 kilometres each way, a distance his father cannot believe he has covered when the boy return home late in the evening.

journey to the end of time contains much about the people Miller has lived and worked amongst, in this case in the west of England:

 For the people I lived and worked with were labouring people, and they left no memories or written histories of themselves. They left themselves only in the memories of those who had known them, until those people too were dead. They were not people for greatness and lasting memoir, but people of dailiness and the soil. There were no textual sources to be examined of their lives. Their lives were lived without record. I loved them and I love still the memory of them.

But as well as the locals, as Miller was saving to pay his fair to Canada, he found another outsider:

An Australian came to stay. He bought a small manor house and a fine hunter, and he dressed himself in his hunting finery and went out with the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. But he was soon made to realise that he was not a local. He had no one to talk to. No one to visit. No one treated him discourteously, but no one befriended him either. His overtures to friendship were politely rebuffed by the local well-to-do. They did not need him. Eventually this Australian found me, another outsider, and he and I became friends. Each of us grateful to have the other.

The Australian lends him a book about the Outback, and, because of that, Canada was abandoned and Australia became Miller’s eventual destination.

I learnt, eventually, that I am a migrant in my nature. I have never migrated for economic or political necessity – to improve my lot or to redeem my liberty – but I have migrated from some impulse I was born with and which I do not understand.

In a short chapter called Training for the Afterlife Miller talks about book reviewing and reviewers. His advice is not to review the works of others. “I am asked occasionally to review the work of other writers. But I don’t do it. A work of art isn’t a house or a pair of shoes. A work of art is a deeply subjective statement. It may even be a deeply spiritual statement. Someone’s life is in it.” He also records his thoughts about the reviewer:

Authors are paranoid creatures who regard reviewers as vicious bastards who can’t write themselves and whose opinions therefore aren’t worth printing; until, that is, the author receives a good review. The reviewer who praises your work is transformed at once (in a miraculous apotheosis) from an incompetent dickhead into a responsible scholar.

One of the joys of this book is to hear Miller writing about others; friends, other writers, artists and people who inspire him. Probably the most special is the account of Max Blatt, who reviewed Miller’s first novel, 400 pages that he had worked on almost every day for two years. Blatt’s comment when he had finished reading was “Why don’t you write about something that you love?” This opened Miller’s eyes and when Blatt told him a story of his escape from an anti-Semitic attack in Poland, Miller spent the whole night turning it into a piece of writing. This time when Blatt read the work, his reaction was “You could have been there.” It became Miller’s story Comrade Pawel published in the literary journal Meanjin. It was the start of Miller’s writing career. Ever since then he has continued to write about what he loves.

If you write about what you love, and you love widely, life and people, you will never run out of material to write about…

Inspiration – that igniting of the imagination which enables us to write beyond ourselves, so that our work shines for us with a light that is not our own – is most often an inner response to a stimulus from outside, some trivial event that triggers memory and alters our mood.

One of the other interesting revelations in the book is the novels and writers that inspire Miller. While he was writing his second novel, The Tivington Nott, he had a copy of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea on his desk. Miller also talks about Graham Greene:

I am not a writer of the likes of Graham Greene. And I don’t mean to speak of the greatness that was his , but only of the singular surety of his voice as he led us from one book to the next. Like Nabokov, you know a Graham Greene book in the dark, just by the feel of it. The voice is always Greene’s. Not that his voice is without variety, but it is the instrument, and like Bach’s voice we know it at once. I have envied such writers. For each of my books I’ve had to come up with the right voice. Having the story has been nothing to me without the voice to tell it with.

Alex Miller is now 89, and he is still excited to be embarking on writing another novel. You can tell from the writing in this book that he loves his craft and he loves to write about the people he encounters and who continue to inspire him.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Allen & Unwin