FICTION
The Deal
Alex Miller
Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Alex Miller only improves with age. The structure, pacing and mellowness of his new novel, The Deal, make it an understated achievement. He writes without histrionics, always dealing with the deepest substance of the human condition rather than its passing moods and fads. Decades of experience are plainly evident in the craftsmanship of this book. Every piece is planed and joined with precision. There are sections that invite rereading, just to ponder the skill this kind of writing requires.

Miller has often drawn on the experience of art and artists and The Deal is no exception. The main character, Andy McPherson, left England when he was 16, a background he shares with the author. As a man of 80 looking back on his youth, he believes he left his family, a cause of great sorrow to them, because he wanted to be alone. “To find a desert where I could no longer be reached.”

His father had been wounded as he sat under an apple tree during World War II. He returns to his family a ghost of his former self, isolated and inaccessible. He finds a measure of solace by returning to his practice of painting. There is a great deal in this book about the redemptive power of art and what happens when art is used as a vehicle of deception; in other words, when it loses its innocence.

Andy writes these memories late in life, a year or so after the death of his partner, Jo, when he has bought a house with an apple tree. He carries with him burdens from his childhood, not least the presence of his father as a kind of conscience. Miller deals superbly with what he calls “the leavings of the past”. He feels the past “dissolving and disappearing, disintegrating into dust and blowing away when it feels the touch of day”. Except it doesn’t vanish easily. The past seeps through until it is visible in whatever the present paints over it.

In his late 30s, Andy, a frustrated writer, meets Jo on a bus travelling from Melbourne to Sydney. We don’t learn much about the 20 years before this. Jo, also isolated from her parents, is visiting her aunt Henrietta, who is dying. When Hennie dies, she bequeaths money to Jo, who is by now pregnant. Their lives are taking a definite shape. They buy a house in South Melbourne, which Miller lovingly describes. His portrayal of houses in The Deal is one of its features. They elicit the personality of their inhabitants.

Andy has been working part-time as an English teacher. It is here that he forms a friendship with Lang Tzu, the art teacher. The pair slip out to the pub at lunchtime. This was the 1970s, after all. They become friends, wryly acknowledging their creative disappointments. Lang eventually asks Andy to become involved in an art deal that is not exactly illegal but more of a clever manoeuvre, meant to outwit experts and earn a large sum of money. Jo resists the idea and as she is left increasingly alone with baby Hennie, starts to feel the burden of her life.

We met Lang Tzu many years ago in the novel that won Miller’s first Miles Franklin prize, The Ancestor Game (1992). Indeed, the set-up of that book is similar to that of The Deal. Stephen, the initial storyteller of The Ancestor Game, has affinities with Andy. But the two novels head off in different directions. The former explores Lang Tzu’s long and winding past; The Deal holds him in a remembered present.