Speaker 1: Hello again. It's Ruby Jones. Welcome back to another episode
Speaker 1: of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by
Speaker 1: editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with
Speaker 1: some of the most talented writers from Australia and around
Speaker 1: the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from
Speaker 1: two times Miles Franklin Award winning author Alex Miller, who's
Speaker 1: discussing his latest novel, The Deal. As always, I'm joined
Speaker 1: by Michael to tell me a bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: I'm Michael, Ruby Jones. How are you.
Speaker 1: I'm well, Thank you so, Michael. Critically acclaimed writer Alex
Speaker 1: Miller has just released his fourteenth novel at the impressive
Speaker 1: age of eighty seven, So tell me a bit about
Speaker 1: his career so far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Ruby, I feel like we've said this a few times.
Speaker 2: I'm read this, but Alex Miller is a two time
Speaker 2: winner of the Miles Franklin Award. It is, you might
Speaker 2: not realize, quite a rare category and it's an indication
Speaker 2: of how long he's been a writer. Working at the
Speaker 2: peak of his career. His first book came out thirty
Speaker 2: seven years ago. It was called Watching the climbers on
Speaker 2: the mountain. But since then he's only gone from strength
Speaker 2: to strength, awards, acclaim, great reviews. Just before he published
Speaker 2: his latest novel, which is the one you mentioned at
Speaker 2: the top, that's the deal, his wife, Stephanie Miller, unearthed
Speaker 2: hundreds of his old notepats, diaries, letters and put them
Speaker 2: together in this collection called a Kind of Confession. I
Speaker 2: love books like this, you know, where you not only
Speaker 2: get an insight into the writer as a person, but
Speaker 2: you can if you follow the timelines, you can really
Speaker 2: get an insight into what was going on in their mind,
Speaker 2: in their life and their correspondence in the lead up
Speaker 2: to writing a book. If you love their output, then
Speaker 2: you go to the letters, you go to the archive,
Speaker 2: and you get a sense of I guess what you
Speaker 2: call the stories behind the books we love.
Speaker 1: And so this new novel, it's actually returning to a
Speaker 1: story that he wrote about more than three decades ago.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. So arguably miller most famous book, most
Speaker 2: celebrated book is a book called The Ancestor Game. Came
Speaker 2: out back in nineteen ninety two and it won the
Speaker 2: Miles Franklin Award. Got a lot of acclaim, and it
Speaker 2: centers around this character called Lang Su, who's an exiled
Speaker 2: Chinese artist who's turned art dealer. Now, the thing is
Speaker 2: that Lang Sue was based on a real life friend
Speaker 2: of Alex Miller's, a guy called Alan o' hoy, and
Speaker 2: the pair met in the mid seventies and they had
Speaker 2: this kind of deep bond, And much of the Ancestor
Speaker 2: Game reads like Miller and his various characters Stephen, August, Gertrude,
Speaker 2: all trying to make sense of this puzzle of a
Speaker 2: man in the work of fiction. Lang Zu survives and
Speaker 2: his kind of triumphant at the end of the book,
Speaker 2: But in real life, Alan o'hoy, the guy was based on,
Speaker 2: died by suicide. His grieving friend paid tribute on the page,
Speaker 2: immortalizing him for the Australian literary firmament. But now more
Speaker 2: than thirty years later, Alex Miller's gone back to the character,
Speaker 2: back to the fiction, and back to his late friend
Speaker 2: and his new novel. The Deal is really interested in
Speaker 2: questions about how writers engage with the world around them.
Speaker 2: It's about artists, It's about Australian racism and marriage and
Speaker 2: parents and children. But more than anything, else, it's about
Speaker 2: giving Lang Su or Alan o'hoy, or even Alex Miller
Speaker 2: himself another go at laying out the truth.
Speaker 1: Coming up. In just a moment, Alex Miller finally lets
Speaker 1: his friend die.
Speaker 2: Alex Miller, are you a rereader of your own work?
Speaker 3: No, I've never read one of my books from beginning
Speaker 3: to end. I've read chunks, bits and pieces of them
Speaker 3: and then sort of remember so much of what's going
Speaker 3: to happen, where it's going to go, and even sentences
Speaker 3: that I made up for Edmund to the end.
Speaker 2: I ask about rereading your work because it seems to
Speaker 2: me the book that came out with your name on
Speaker 2: the front of it before the deal was a kind
Speaker 2: of confession, and it was a collaboration with your wife, Stephanie.
Speaker 4: It was Stephanie who did it.
Speaker 2: It was her project of unearthing your papers, your letters
Speaker 2: and compiling them in a way that tells a story
Speaker 2: of a writerly life and a body of work. How
Speaker 2: did you feel about that process? How was it to
Speaker 2: be confronted with your words of forty years ago and
Speaker 2: think about what they meant, what they said about you,
Speaker 2: and how you've changed.
Speaker 3: How had I done it? I wouldn't have done it
Speaker 3: the way she did. She and Annette Barlow, my publisher,
Speaker 3: were in it together, and it took a long time
Speaker 3: for them to put it all together. I'm an unbelievable
Speaker 3: amount of material. For years since I can remember, I've
Speaker 3: kept letters, and then of course when email came in,
Speaker 3: I kept what I thought it was significant responses for
Speaker 3: and me, so that the letters have a place, and
Speaker 3: I love writing letters. I wouldn't have put in the
Speaker 3: stuff that Steph put in. She went through to the earliest,
Speaker 3: went through all my diaries, every diary for bloody years,
Speaker 3: and all the notebooks, piles of notebooks. I mean a
Speaker 3: lot of those notebooks just had things like dentists three PM,
Speaker 3: you know, stuff like that in them about them.
Speaker 2: But that's a good name for a future book about.
Speaker 3: The dentist three pm root canal. Yeah, So I mean no,
Speaker 3: I was very busy while she was doing it, writing
Speaker 3: another book. I can't remember what the book was. It
Speaker 3: may have even been this one the deal, but I
Speaker 3: didn't read it. I had no input to it. I
Speaker 3: attempted to have an input to it at one point
Speaker 3: by saying, looking at what had been done at a
Speaker 3: fairly late stage, and I said, well, all my my
Speaker 3: essays on art have been left out. There's nothing in
Speaker 3: there to indicate really my lifetime interest in art. And
Speaker 3: Steph said that's for another collection. We've kept them out
Speaker 3: on purpose. I said, okay, so yeah, it was absolutely
Speaker 3: STEP's job.
Speaker 4: Smart woman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's my first editor, and she'll save a book
Speaker 3: from being discarded altogether and see something else in it
Speaker 3: that it needs rearranging, or the perspective's a bit wrong.
Speaker 4: That's what the trouble is.
Speaker 3: That's why you're talking about giving it up and doing
Speaker 3: something else. And it again shines a light for me
Speaker 3: on the work that's a long way from finished.
Speaker 2: It seems directly relevant to me to the deal, because
Speaker 2: the deal is partly an act of reckoning with one
Speaker 2: of your most celebrated works book of many years ago.
Speaker 2: And there is a letter that you send your Chinese
Speaker 2: translator in a kind of confession, where you offer a
Speaker 2: forward for the Chinese edition of The Ancestor Game. I
Speaker 2: really I can't remember that, and it begins I began
Speaker 2: to work on The Ancestor Game in order to try
Speaker 2: to understand the tragic death of a dear friend the
Speaker 2: man on whom the hero of this book is based.
Speaker 2: Langzu was a real person. He was my friend. He
Speaker 2: was an Australian Chinese artist who had lived his entire
Speaker 2: life outside China. He failed to achieve recognition as an
Speaker 2: artist in Australia and his life came to seem to
Speaker 2: him to be more and more pointless as time went on. Eventually,
Speaker 2: at the age of fifty, he shot himself.
Speaker 4: So really it had been revealed.
Speaker 3: I've forgotten that was in there all that I've.
Speaker 2: Written only for the Chinese forward of the book, but
Speaker 2: you laid it out there very clearly. That engine for
Speaker 2: the Ancestor.
Speaker 4: Game, but also for this book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and for this book.
Speaker 3: Because in the Ancestor Game he doesn't die.
Speaker 2: So I want to begin with the ancest again before
Speaker 2: we get to the deal and by what motivated you
Speaker 2: as a writer to tell his story and what motivated
Speaker 2: the decision to let him live?
Speaker 3: Yeah, really good questions that I've asked myself many times,
Speaker 3: and there are many different answers to them, depending at
Speaker 3: what stage of life you're at. For the first two
Speaker 3: or three years after he shot himself, I was very
Speaker 3: upset about it and quite depressed. Often and if I
Speaker 3: had a few drinks in the evening, I'd start lamenting
Speaker 3: his death, which made me angry and disappointed and a
Speaker 3: number of confused emotions for quite a long time. And
Speaker 3: Steph finally said, well, why don't you write a book
Speaker 3: about him? And I knew immediately that she was right,
Speaker 3: I should do it. So yeah, I mean to clear
Speaker 3: your mind in a sense, to get it over, to
Speaker 3: deal with it. And that book what didn't become the deal,
Speaker 3: It didn't become.
Speaker 4: The real life.
Speaker 3: It became a real and an imaginary life. And it
Speaker 3: took me back into Chinese history in Australia, and it
Speaker 3: brought me to the realization that if you're Chinese, you're
Speaker 3: never going to be an icsy bloke. If you're Irish
Speaker 3: or English or a German migrant you can be a
Speaker 3: nussy bloke, not if you're Chinese.
Speaker 4: It began to sink into me that that was the case.
Speaker 3: And of course I also read in great depth the
Speaker 3: history in Australia, the published history in Australia of anti
Speaker 3: Chinese feeling and racism, which ran deep. There was even
Speaker 3: a I mean, it hasn't hasn't gone away if you're
Speaker 3: Chinese you must come across it from time to time.
Speaker 3: And I was talking to Alice Pung the other day
Speaker 3: and she and I are friends. She came for lunch
Speaker 3: and we were talking about it, and she just said, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, it's normal for it to be in her life,
Speaker 3: the lives of her friends who are Asians. And one
Speaker 3: of the reviews a very good review of the deal
Speaker 3: actually and it was lovely to get it in the
Speaker 3: Australian Book Review, and in that the reviewer, who has
Speaker 3: nothing negative to say about the book said, it's a
Speaker 3: stretch for me to believe that this or you didn't
Speaker 3: quite say to believe, but it's a stretch for me
Speaker 3: that this Chinese drunk has valued so highly by dealers
Speaker 3: and auctioneers in the art world in Melbourne. Anybody who
Speaker 3: was involved in the art world in Melbourne in the
Speaker 3: seventies and eighties knew Lang Zu, they knew Alan o'hoy,
Speaker 3: the man on whom he was based. I mean that
Speaker 3: was unconscious racism in the sense that if it had
Speaker 3: been a drunken German dealer or a drunken Ossie dealer,
Speaker 3: now I would have blinked an I it was Chinese
Speaker 3: dealer he was a secret dealer and a collector, and
Speaker 3: he was relied on by a lot of agents and
Speaker 3: also people in the business of auctioning paintings.
Speaker 2: That anger and grief in the wake of his death.
Speaker 2: You know that, I understand that as an impulse to write,
Speaker 2: But what you're reckoning with the man.
Speaker 3: You must look. I loved him, and as you know,
Speaker 3: if somebody who loved dies, they're with you forever.
Speaker 4: They don't go away.
Speaker 3: People like Alan Barry Reid really critically important people to me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean a lot of people have gone into my
Speaker 3: books who are now did friends, people I loved and
Speaker 3: cared deeply about the truth of what they had lived,
Speaker 3: the truth of what they'd claimed those things are I
Speaker 3: mean yeah to me. I mean Ray Gaetor always says
Speaker 3: I'm a searcher after truth, and I hadn't kind of
Speaker 3: realized that there was anything special until he said that,
Speaker 3: and I thought, oh, yeah, I am too, because that's
Speaker 3: what interests me, to get to the truth of the story.
Speaker 3: I mean the story in a sense, if you're a writer,
Speaker 3: you don't have.
Speaker 4: This beginning of the story.
Speaker 3: You don't have the middle of the story.
Speaker 4: It's only when the end of the.
Speaker 3: Story appears to you that you realize, oh my god,
Speaker 3: there's a story there.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 3: When that began, you think, and then you've got the
Speaker 3: compass of the story.
Speaker 4: If you like it. If you like it.
Speaker 2: When we return, Alex shares why he had to return
Speaker 2: to the story of his friend and set the truth straight,
Speaker 2: and why he's no longer scared of death, We'll be
Speaker 2: right back. If seeing the shape of the story isn't
Speaker 2: clear until you get the end of the story, how
Speaker 2: different is telling a story when that end is death
Speaker 2: by suicide, when that end is at the hand of
Speaker 2: the person that you're writing about.
Speaker 3: Well, writing the Deal wasn't the same as writing The
Speaker 3: Ancestor Game. It was a desire to tell the truth.
Speaker 3: Because when I wrote The Ancestor Game, people who'd known
Speaker 3: Allen wrote to me or rang me up and in
Speaker 3: those days left a message saying you brought him back
Speaker 3: and thanking me, Well, yeah, but he's dead.
Speaker 4: He shot himself. That was the reality.
Speaker 3: And as you just pointed out in that Book of Steps,
Speaker 3: I actually wrote about that to Professor Leo, who translates
Speaker 3: my stuff into Chinese. I think that writing this book Deal,
Speaker 3: it came simply in a sense, from a desire to
Speaker 3: the two things. I suppose one is that I'm continuing
Speaker 3: with a kind of autobiography because it's it all comes
Speaker 3: from friends and loved ones.
Speaker 4: I'm concerned.
Speaker 3: I did try and write about a person I disliked
Speaker 3: intensely once, and through trying to write about him, I
Speaker 3: began to like him and understand his motivation and have
Speaker 3: some sympathy with it. The real life bloke I still
Speaker 3: didn't like. But I find it very difficult to write
Speaker 3: about people I don't like.
Speaker 2: You'd written him into someone you understood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Anyway, the reason I wrote The Deal was to
Speaker 3: bring a couple of things into perspective. One was the
Speaker 3: fact of my father as the good man before the war,
Speaker 3: and his gift to me of the simplicity of art,
Speaker 3: in that innocence of art as it can be, and
Speaker 3: the corruption of art which happens in the book, with
Speaker 3: the substitution of paintings and recognition of things and all that.
Speaker 3: And in the end the signature. I mean, neither he
Speaker 3: nor I put the signature on that picture, but it
Speaker 3: was there, and it was sold in London for some
Speaker 3: enormous and.
Speaker 2: The heart of the Deal is your surrogate if you
Speaker 2: like Andy, and I'm curious at times it's a picture
Speaker 2: of the writer as someone who is extractive of the
Speaker 2: people in their life. And it seems to me that
Speaker 2: if we understand this book partly through the lens of autobiography,
Speaker 2: you seem critical of your chosen profession.
Speaker 3: It's the same in the Ancestor Game. I actually call
Speaker 3: the writer a parasite in the Ancestor Game because he
Speaker 3: is feeding off the material of his engaging main protagonist
Speaker 3: of a book that maybe he will write one day.
Speaker 3: So yes, he's kind of feeding off a relationship.
Speaker 4: But both of us were. We were both.
Speaker 3: Using each other, And you do have to ask, is
Speaker 3: there any friendship in which the two people don't use
Speaker 3: each other to some extent? I mean, I know they say, oh,
Speaker 3: he's a user or she's a user, and that's a
Speaker 3: derogatory term. But nevertheless, we do use or make use
Speaker 3: of friends in all sorts of ways, and they do
Speaker 3: of us too. We find we have been used and
Speaker 3: not unpleasant way.
Speaker 2: If the Deal is partly about telling the truth of
Speaker 2: that relationship and of that time and that story, is
Speaker 2: it a stretch then to say that you feel that
Speaker 2: you weren't telling the truth in the ancest again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not a stretch. I suppose it's just the
Speaker 3: truth to say that I wasn't. I mean, the ancestor
Speaker 3: game is a lot of it is history making the point.
Speaker 3: I suppose that the Chinese or arrived twelve years after
Speaker 3: Melbourne was declared a settlement, and that they came before
Speaker 3: the gold, whereas, of course the story is normally that
Speaker 3: they came for the gold and then went home again,
Speaker 3: which is simply not true.
Speaker 4: Maybe true of some people.
Speaker 3: It's certainly true of English people who came out with money,
Speaker 3: significant amounts of money, and exploited land and sheep and
Speaker 3: cattle for a few years and then went back again
Speaker 3: to England. Lots of lots of them, and that was
Speaker 3: but that's not said about them.
Speaker 2: Part of what works so beautifully in the deal and
Speaker 2: makes the way it recast the story so moving is
Speaker 2: the perspective of time and age, you know, and his
Speaker 2: voice and his story comes from from the other end
Speaker 2: of a lifetime, so much so that the book ends
Speaker 2: in the first person and his voice and in old
Speaker 2: age kind of looking back at this stuff. How important
Speaker 2: is that perspective of distance. I mean, I imagine the
Speaker 2: Alex Miller who wrote The Ancestor Game not only didn't
Speaker 2: write The Deal then, but couldn't have that. It's something
Speaker 2: that you can only come to several decades on in
Speaker 2: your writing career.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I've simplified things in as much as
Speaker 3: I'm able to in the last few books. I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm not capable of writing a great, big book anymore.
Speaker 3: I'm too old to take on a subject that requires
Speaker 3: a lot of research, and He's going to finish up
Speaker 3: being a sort of six hundred page book. So it's
Speaker 3: kind of in my interests anyway, to be much tighter
Speaker 3: and more disciplined about the way I.
Speaker 4: Deliver a story.
Speaker 3: So yeah, a kind of not a kind of confession.
Speaker 3: What was it called? A brief Affair and a Deal?
Speaker 3: I were both relatively short books compared to Ancestor Game,
Speaker 3: which is not huge, but still it's big in terms
Speaker 3: of its subject and its grasp of things, and it's
Speaker 3: historical reference and all that.
Speaker 4: But the.
Speaker 3: Deal runs from when I was a kid to now
Speaker 3: I'm what eighty seven, I'll be eighty eight next month December.
Speaker 2: It's distressing to me, Alex, You're in better nick than
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 4: And then you know, well I work at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I work at it. Two, that's not having any
Speaker 2: and me of the same success you're having.
Speaker 4: It's just luck.
Speaker 3: But yeah, So the perspective that I now have on it,
Speaker 3: I think needs to be stated in this book because
Speaker 3: the guts of the book, the deal is a story
Speaker 3: that happened a long time ago. It's also the story
Speaker 3: of Stephanie and our meeting and having our first child
Speaker 3: and what that did to me. And for a lot
Speaker 3: of people, that's the most important part of the book.
Speaker 3: None of the reviewers so far has mentioned Australian racism
Speaker 3: as having any part to play in it, except Chinese people.
Speaker 3: That is, it's the most important part of the book
Speaker 3: for them.
Speaker 2: I'm so curious about whether the writer in their eighties
Speaker 2: is more comfortable letting their friend die on the page
Speaker 2: than the writer in their forties, you know, whether that
Speaker 2: or their fifties. You know, whether whether that distance allowed
Speaker 2: you to be truer this time around.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's probably an insight, of valuable insight.
Speaker 3: But you're not afraid of death when you're old. I mean,
Speaker 3: why be afraid of death when you're in your eighties.
Speaker 3: For Christ's sake, you should be dead and it will
Speaker 3: be soon. I used to call it, and I probably
Speaker 3: still do. People don't like it, of course, is the
Speaker 3: death zone. Someone turns eighty and they let me know
Speaker 3: a party, and so you're in the death zone now,
Speaker 3: and they say, oh fuck felks for Christ, cheer up, mate.
Speaker 2: You might want to work on the messages you're writing cards,
Speaker 2: if that's what you're doing.
Speaker 3: But that's when we die. We die in our eighties.
Speaker 3: Ninety percent of us die in our eighties. A few
Speaker 3: slip through to their nineties. Not too many are still
Speaker 3: being productive in any sort of serious way into their nineties.
Speaker 3: So that's another challenge yet to be faced. I mean,
Speaker 3: when you're forty five, you're scared of death. When you're
Speaker 3: fifty year scared of death, you think, oh fuck, I've
Speaker 3: got bloody cancer. Now you never think that.
Speaker 4: At my age.
Speaker 3: I've never give it a thought. I just look at
Speaker 3: Steph and I think, I hope you're okay when I'm gone, you.
Speaker 2: Know, before I let you go, I just want to ask,
Speaker 2: just cut and ride for the record, if there's something
Speaker 2: that you want readers of the Deal to understand to
Speaker 2: take away and remember about your friend Allen. What would it?
Speaker 3: No, people read their own book, and my books hopefully
Speaker 3: are open to readers to read their own book, so
Speaker 3: that a young person in Bowel will picked a book
Speaker 3: up and read it, and they'll read their own book.
Speaker 3: They won't notice the racism, or they will notice it,
Speaker 3: or they won't notice the innocence of art and the
Speaker 3: corruption of art as a possible dichotomy a subject, if
Speaker 3: you like. They might notice the falling in love on
Speaker 3: the bus, maybe that will be the main story for them.
Speaker 2: Or the way a man talks to his daughter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that having children was the greatest of end of
Speaker 3: my life, and I think probably of many parents' lives.
Speaker 3: The event of having a child changed everything.
Speaker 4: It humanized me.
Speaker 2: Well. I concur with your other readers who think The
Speaker 2: Deal might be the finest thing you've done. It's a
Speaker 2: masterpiece and thrill to discover that you're still delivering masterpieces.
Speaker 2: And I'm excited for the next one.
Speaker 4: Thanks for your churn vote.
Speaker 2: It's an absolute pleasure. Great as ever to see you YouTube.
Speaker 2: Mike Alex Miller's latest book is The Deal. It's available
Speaker 2: at all good bookstores now.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. As always, if you want to dive
Speaker 1: further in to Read This, you can search for it
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