I'm very pleased to be able to announce that 88 Lines About 44 Women has been shortlisted in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2010, amid some very esteemed company, J M Coetzee, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan, Craig Silvey and Cate Kennedy. The awards will be announced on 17th May, the prize is winning, but also a handy $40 000. For a list of all the short-lists go here.

Am I the only person finding Margaret Atwood harder and harder to read?I say this as a former fan. No, cut the former, a real fan. I think The Blind Assassin is one of the true classics of our time. Alias Grace is a remarkable achievement. Oryx and Crake, simply stunning. But the new book, In the Year of the Flood, damn! What a waste of time. Having bought the thing and ploughed bravely through its tedious pages I have read the kind notices it received with astonishment, and not just a frisson of terror.Now she’s taken to writing for the New York Review of Books. I buy the NYRB because no matter the subject I’m happy to read the articles, if only because of the quality of the writing. But in the two recent pieces I’ve read by Atwood the writing is woeful, a kind of embarrassing twaddle, patronising of both the reader and the author, missing the point of what a review is for. Here is the opening paragraph of one from last year:

‘The Confessions of Edward Day is Valerie Martin's ninth novel, and it's a triumph of her unique art. As usual, it's easy on the ear—Martin writes with amplitude, precision, grace, and wit—but it's hard on the characters. They do not spare one another, and their author doesn't spare them. None of Martin's books ends with kisses all around and happy feasts, and The Confessions of Edward Day is no exception. Reader, be warned: you won't end up in Cinderella's castle. But you'll have a fine time not getting there.’

The review continues for another 3474 words in this same hectoring tone, like a schoolmarm addressing a group of reluctant readers. But if you thought this was a one-off you were mistaken. She adopts the same voice in the latest edition, this time discussing Anthill, the first novel by the acclaimed scientist E O Wilson.It seems clear that Atwood feels it would have been better if Wilson had kept to science. In amongst giving a detailed outline of the plot and taking time out to question why Wilson should have engaged in the exercise at all (‘Those who’ve been at it for a while might have warned him off’) she finds writes the following:

‘Like Wilson, “Raff” grows up in Alabama at a time not far from that in which Wilson himself grew up. Like Wilson again, young Raff takes a great interest in nature, focuses on ants, and goes on to study at Harvard. As you might expect in the work of a first-time novelist, some of these passages most likely contain boyhood reminiscences. The foods of the time and place are lovingly described, down to each sundae with chopped walnuts and each bowl of gumbo…’

‘As you might expect in the work of…!’ This is a book that Atwood is praising, mind. God help you if she didn’t like your work. But then God help you if she reviews your book at all if the piece is made up of sentences such as: ‘Like Wilson, “Raff” grows up in Alabama at a time not far from that in which Wilson himself grew up.’ Is it possible to be more convoluted? Did no-one edit this crap?I wrote above that I read The Year of the Flood with increasing frustration but also a frisson of terror. This last came about because it seemed to me that if someone as good as Atwood could produce such guff without realising it then what hope was there for any of us?(By which, of course, I mean, me.) So much of writing is the business of wading through shit for months at a time, believing your bare feet will somehow, somewhere, pick up a jewel. But what if it really is all shit and there’s no jewel? If Atwood can’t tell that, how might I?I suppose the difference is that someone will be quick to tell me, whereas no-one, not even the New York Review of Books, has the guts to tell her.

Discussion about development on the Sunshine Coast continues.There is a population forum and someone holds a meeting that someone else claims is nothing more than a plant for the Liberal National Party.An article in Prospect here suggests that population is not the problem, that an African villager can have ten children who each have ten children (for two generations) and all of them put together won’t emit as many greenhouse gasses as one average American in their lifetime.In the meantime I interrupt perfectly decent dinner parties to ask people what they think of the idea of five hundred thousand people living on the Coast.A man who looked like a French cineaste’s idea of an intellectual – swept back grey hair, black polo-neck shirt, slim, wearing, yes, corduroy pants – but proves to be a famous musician composer, began by saying (possibly not the best opening line but there you go):‘I am Dutch. I go back to the Netherlands from time to time to see my family. In my country when they want to make a new development they have to go through so many miles of red tape, even before they begin. But once they start thinking about it seriously the first thing they ask is where is the railway line. Where is it? How does this housing plan fit with it? Do we need to build a new one? They design the streets and the shops and the schools around where the station is. And then, if there’s money left over, last of all, they think about the road. Here! Here we are stupid. More than stupid. Here we are insane.’Curiously my own cynicism about the Dutch (you can always tell a Dutchman, but not very much) was given its comeuppance not just by this articulate gentleman but by a fascinating article in the New York Review of Books, about the cultural, social, political and artistic influence of the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century on the development of what came to be Great Britain. The article is accompanied by this marvellous picture of ‘William of Orange sets out to invade the British Isles.’Spot the problem. I was born and raised in Scotland and we were always taught Britain hadn't been invaded since the Battle of Hastings. What’s going on here? Is there some deeply embedded racism in my system which lives in denial of the facts of history? Is this why we were taught to be suspicious of Dutchmen? Because if we listened to them we might learn the awful truth?

Let me begin with the bloggers lament: No, scrap that. Here I am. Now. I've been waiting for Don Paterson's book to arrive. Rain. I talked about one of his poems from this collection a few weeks ago here but I cannot resist posting the complete version of the title poem. It needs, I believe, to be read aloud to hear the full cadence, the internal rhyme.Now, a few hours later, and much sweat, and no success, I post this poem. It's supposed to have spaces every fourth line but Wordpress takes them out regardless of what I do in CSS or HTML or anywhere else. If you know how to fix this please, please tell me.

Rain

I love all films that start with rain:rain, braiding a windowpaneor darkening a hung-out dressor streaming down her upturned face;one big thundering downpourright through the empty script and scorebefore the act, before the blame,before the lens pulls through the frameto where the woman sits alonebeside a silent telephoneor the dress lies ruined on the grassor the girl walks off the overpass,and all things flow out from that sourcealong their fatal watercourse.However bad or overlongsuch a film can do no wrong,so when his native twang shows throughor when the boom slips into viewor when her speech starts to betrayits adaptation from the play,I think to when we opened coldon a starlit gutter, running goldwith the neon of a drugstore signand I’d read into its blazing line:forget the ink, the milk, the blood –all was washed clean with the floodwe rose up from the falling watersthe fallen rain’s own sons and daughtersand none of this, none of this matters.Don Paterson, Rain. Farrar Straus Geroux, 2009Can I say: treat yourself. Section V from the poem Phantom is as close and as beautiful a description of our fate as anything I've ever read.

The Guardian has invited several writers to give their rules for writing fiction. The list includes Elmore Leonard, addressing the perils of adverbs, Hilary Mantel, Richard Ford (marry someone who likes the idea of you being a writer) and many more, to be found here.

The February issue of the Australian Literary Review contains an interesting essay by Luke Slattery on the role of Macquarie and Greenway in the development of the early colony in Sydney.

‘This year,’ Slattery writes, ‘marks the bicentenary of Macquarie’s governorship and recalls his fruitful, though at times fractious, partnership with Greenway. Both men were fired by a belief in the built forms of civility and in the capacity of what we now call the public sector to provide cultural and economic stimulus … Macquarie understood instinctively that inward-dwelling civic virtues are nurtured by noble outward forms: space, mass, order, ornament … [he] embarked on a program of enlightened reform, civic improvement and territorial expansion that utterly changed the young colony’s sense of itself and its possibilities.’

How remote these sensibilities are from our present day. No matter that, as a nation, we continue to reap their benefits.I live, along with some six to ten thousand other souls, in the Hinterland behind the Sunshine Coast, a loose geographical area to the north of Brisbane, in Queensland’s south-east corner. The Sunshine Coast is not the Gold Coast, that region to the south where Mammon has entirely taken hold, it is a place still coming into being.At the moment the population is a bit more than two hundred thousand, but the plan is to ‘grow the city’ to five hundred thousand over the next ten to fifteen years. The trouble is that there is no city, there is, in fact, nothing that defines the place other than a few iconic landscape features every one of which is in danger of being destroyed by the influx of people. I speak, of course, of the beaches, the Glasshouse Mountains, the paperbark and wollum coastal swamps, and the Hinterland itself.There are several urban centres which have recently been forcibly amalgamated into one region, and the new overarching Council is trying hard to find some common thread, some defining characteristic which can unite the population and give it some sense of community. The difficulty is that all of these urban centres have seen rapid and often unstructured growth over the last two decades and there is only a vague sense of community within the smaller districts, let alone in the larger area. One might be forgiven for thinking the whole place was simply a creation of the late twentieth century’s passion for real estate.Certainly there is nothing which might be described as an architecture of the region.There are individual houses that attract attention from those interested in design, but there is barely a public building worth mention. The one place where this might have been rectified, at the new university, failed fundamentally, at the very instant of its creation, by locating itself on a greenfield site (the land was cheaper) instead of in the centre of Maroochydore where it might have given stimulus to the civic ideal. Now the institution sits, irrelevant on its windswept paddock, while around its generous fringes arises a shocking urban sprawl typified by tilt-up concrete warehouses and brick veneer homes begging to be retro-fitted the day they are complete.Anna Bligh, the Premier, had the gall to appear on the ABC’s By Design program on Radio National to spruik her government’s vision of good design. Here, on the Sunshine Coast, its absence screams from every gaudy shopping mall, from every excruciating traffic light, from the lack of a rail link to the missing hospitals.Up here in the Hinterland we take a broad view: The Sunshine Coast is buggered, might sum it up fairly neatly, we need to concentrate on what can still be saved here on the Range. But is this enough? If Macquarie and Greenway could see the possibilities in a bunch of maltreated convicts (Greenway being one himself), if they could recognise that,

‘the flowering of a civilised community could be encouraged not only by the strict regularising of the precepts of government but also by providing – in the form of buildings and roads, the planning of towns and the demarcation of counties – physical frameworks within which to develop.’

and through this recognition utterly transform the early settlement of this nation, is it not our responsibility to try to achieve the same? Even if the clay we have to work with is so much more amorphous, so given over to the lure of instant wealth?

The December 17^th issue of the New York Review of Books has an article from John Lanchester about Nabokov’s posthumous novel, The Original of Laura.In it Lanchester discusses the difference between an author’s signature and their style, and, as a way of explaining this he writes:

‘One example might be from one of Nabokov’s most famous flashes of brilliance, Humbert Humbert’s memory of his mother in Lolita: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” It’s hard not to be dazzled by the parenthesis, which is pure signature; but the heart of the sentence, its moment of style, is in the quieter and much less prominent word “photogenic.” You realize that Humbert knows his mother only from photographs. The sentence’s quiet poetry is the poetry of loss.’

I struggle to express how profoundly such a piece of writing moves me. Firstly the Nabokov, which I naturally love, as if his use of words is already part of the mechanism of my blood flow, and reading them again makes it quicken. But then secondly with Lanchester’s analysis of why it moves me, which I had never previously understood.This is the thing, I guess. As a reader, some might say a compulsive reader, since my early teens, I both consume words (and produce them), without really knowing how or why one piece moves me and another does not. I’ve tried to understand it but I don’t think intellectualising necessarily helps. What I’ve learned to do is to trust the quality of resonance which sentences generate within me when I read them or hear them. My own or someone else’s.Occasionally though, I stumble upon examples which are so extraordinary that a certain amount of analysis is essential. Here is one that I recently found in Alexsandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles:The story is called ‘Good Living.’ The narrator is Bosnian, he is selling magazines door to door in Chicago, the outer suburbs:

‘My best turf was Blue Island, way down Western Avenue, where addresses had five-digit numbers, as though the town was far back of the long line of people waiting to enter downtown paradise. I got along pretty well with the Blue Islanders. They could quickly recognise the indelible lousiness of my job; they offered me food and water; once I nearly got laid. They did not waste their time contemplating the purpose of human life; their years were spent as a tale is told: slowly, steadily, approaching the inexorable end. In the meantime, all they wanted was to live, wisely use what little love they had accrued, and endure life with the anaesthetic help of television and magazines. I happened to be in the neighbourhood to offer the magazines.’

The first time I encountered this passage I had to stop and read it four times, and then ring up a friend and read it to him aloud, twice, over the telephone, before I could begin to think about continuing my life.Take, ‘As though the town was far back of the…’ This ‘far back of’ is a peculiarly American use of English, here used by someone writing in their second, adopted, language. Its unusual word order, the extra ‘of’, seems to deliberately push the suburb further back in the sentence, further away from the place where the numbers were smaller, where (apparently) paradise is.But it turns out that it’s not just onomatopoeic in its placement. It’s also elegant. If I was writing the sentence I would probably have started by trying: ‘as if the town were a long way along, no, cross that out, can’t have a long way along, well then, a long way down, or, a long way towards the back of the long line,’ all of which are unsatisfactory. So I’d rewrite it and rewrite it, and eventually start to question if that was what I really wanted to say when I couldn’t get it to work, perhaps break it up into two or three sentences or try to come up with a different metaphor. It is unlikely I’d have stumbled upon Hemon’s solution: ‘as though the town was far back of the long line of people waiting to enter downtown paradise.’But then he goes on: ‘They did not waste their time contemplating the purpose of human life; …’ This was the sentence I wanted my friend particularly to hear when I called him up but he got lost in the throwaway line, ‘once I nearly got laid,’ and the story that spins off from there. So I had to read it to him twice:

‘their years were spent as a tale is told: slowly, steadily, approaching the inexorable end. In the meantime, all they wanted was to live, wisely use what little love they had accrued, and endure life with the anaesthetic help of television and magazines. I happened to be in the neighbourhood to offer the magazines.’

Here is writing of an extremely high order. When I read something like that I feel as though the game is up. We may as well all go home, Beethoven is amongst us, what’s the use?

Bernard is living in a cottage near Lake Cooroibah. It’s a little place he’s got with a small shed nearby which is perfect for his painting except that it’s so hot inside. So hot that he can only work for an hour or so before he has to retreat. It’s not as bad at night. He’s working with paint and gravity. This was how he did those remarkable paintings of cows that are a bit reminiscent of Sydney Long trees in the fawn picture, black and white pieces in which he has held up the canvas, he says, and let the paint fall this way and that, not using a brush but instead turning the backboard around, performing a sort of dance with the paint and the canvas.This new set I’m doing, he says. I’m starting with a painting of a Hills Hoist and I’ve got these skins, these cow skins hanging on it. You know that place down on the highway near Aussie World, that has the skins hanging on the fence. Like that.Bernard has an expressive forehead. There are deep horizontal parallel grooves in it that form and disappear as he talks, working as intimate contributors to his conversation. Adding nuance. We start talking about one thing and the next moment we’re onto another and then another. Hardware barns, Soirees, running away from boarding school in Ireland and Scotland. A comparison of escapes and the lessons learned.He tells the story: when he wanted out of boarding school at eleven years old he’d pretended to have a stomach ache so consistently and effectively that eventually they took his appendix out.I’ll never trust a fucking (the Irish comes out in him when he swears, fooking and shite) I’ll never trust a fucking doctor again in my life, he says.But back to Lake Cooroibah:I sometimes think I should sit down and write a best-selling novel, he says. I don’t know how else I’m going to live, that's for sure. I’ve been there for five months you know and I’m thinking that the Great Cooroibah novel probably hasn’t yet been written and maybe it’s up to me to write it. I wonder, though. I mean, if I start, will it happen?

A review in the Weekend Australian of Don Paterson’s new collection of poems (written by Robert Gray) has drawn me back to his earlier works, in particular the afterword for his translations of the Sonnets of Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, simply called Orpheus.Probably I should be talking about the poems but it is the Afterword which in this case most grabs me. Paterson finds himself ‘dismayed to discover the Sonnet’s recent recruitment to the cause of “spiritual literature”’. He believes that the Sonnets are ‘a strongly non-religious work, and easily capable of an anti-religious interpretation.’Casually reading the slim volume late at night in my bed I stumble upon this paragraph:

‘The two principal religious errors seem to me beautifully refuted in the Sonnets. The first is to think of truth as being in the possession of an inscrutable third party, whose knowledge and intentions can only be divined. However, we are all the thinking that matter is doing in this part of the universe. If the universe has an eye, it sees only through the eyes on this Earth and elsewhere; if a mind it thinks only in these minds …

‘The second error is to think of an afterlife or any reincarnation we are bound for as more extraordinary than finding ourselves here in the first place. This projection of ourselves into a future beyond our deaths warps our actions in, and therefore our sense of responsibility to, the here and now – as well as our negotiations with the real beings with whom we share and to whom we will bequeath a home … This, in a perfectly straightforward sense, is already life after death, as remarkably so as any “you” you might wake as in the future. Factor out the illusion of the unitary self – being a phantom centre created by an evolutionary necessity – and its back-formations of ego and soul, and being here once is the identically equivalent miracle to being here again.’

Suddenly I’m sitting up, wide awake. What Paterson articulates so concisely is something I encounter every time my mind comes awake for long enough to notice where it is I am: that this is all there is, here, in this moment. That this person I’m with, this weather we’re having, this room we’re in, or this mountain that we’re on, is, in fact, the moment, for all its unsatisfactoriness, equal in intensity and possibility to every other moment. The quality of attention which I bring to where I am is the governing factor controlling how important it is, not some external force.It shouldn’t, I guess, surprise me to find such acuity in Paterson. He is the poet who, apart from writing his own poems, also translated the poetry of the Spaniard Antonio Machado, producing the book The Eyes.In the Afterword to that collection, speaking of translation, he wrote:

‘These poems are versions, not translations. A reader looking for an accurate translation of Antonio Merchado’s words, then, should stop here and go out and buy another book – probably Alan Trueblood’s Antonio Machado: Selected Poems, which although it isn’t poetry, at least gives a more reliable reflection of the surface of Machado’s verse. Poems, though, are considerably more than the agglomerated meaning of their words, and in writing these versions I initially tried to be true to a poem’s argument and to its vision … This quickly became the more familiar project of trying to make a musical and argumentative unity of the material at hand, and this consideration, in overriding all others, led to mangling, shifts of emphasis, omission, deliberate mistranslantion, the conflation of different poems, the insertion of whole new lines and on a few occasions the writing of entirely new poems. In the end it became about nothing more than a commitment to a process – what Machado everywhere refers to as “the road”’.

I must off to the bookstore to buy this new collection, entitled Rain. Gray quotes several of the poems in his review. This one caught my attention, from ‘Phantom’:

We come from nothing and return to it.

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us.

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation.

We are its only nerve and hand and eye.

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard

Let me begin by saying that Ben Whishaw makes an excellent Keats. There is a nervous frailty to him, a boy-in-the-man intensity which is ideal for the part. Abbie Cornish, too, is wonderfully cast as Fanny Brawne  – although it needs to be said that I know nothing of this girl, Fanny – but Cornish is so beautiful, in a classical reflective manner, that the screen cannot have enough of her. For much of the film she has her hair pinned tightly back from her forehead with a perfect straight part which adds to the mask-like perfection of her features, the combination of her boldness and her uncertainty. Surely the camera loves her; it lingers on her face, on the pinched porcelain of her upper lip, it returns again and again to her as an object of desire, not simply for Keats, but for all of us.In the meantime Whishaw, as Keats, scribbles poetry both in the company of his garrulous Scots friend Brown, and in various more romantic locations. There are occasional snippets recited for us. Christopher Ricks in the New York Review of Books complained that Campion had felt it necessary to addend the words with pictures, so that if Keats was describing, in a poem, snow, so we had to see it, or if a nightingale, we had to hear it, and as a result of his comments I was on the watch for this but found it to be unfair, the poems themselves were understated and deftly placed – the only situation where I found myself in agreement with Mr Ricks was for the final reading, a complete rendition of Ode to a Nightingale, recited by Whishaw while the credits rolled.Here was an interesting phenomena: Keats has died, grief has set in, the film closes with an unnecessary snippet of information about Fanny wandering about the woods, and another, that Keats, when he died at 25 years old, considered himself a failure, and then cuts to the credits. Music begins, and Whishaw starts to read. He has come to embody Keats during the last couple of hours – whatever criticism the viewer might have of the film, this much is certain – and now he’s reading one of the poet’s more sublime works, and reading it well, beautifully even. But two powerful things arise to undermine him. The first is the music, which seems to bear little or no relation to the words; the piece is in three short movements and the breaks between them come arbitrarily, not even in sync with the verses, and these all too brief silences only emphasise the inappropriateness of the music, presenting as they do an opportunity to hear the man’s voice unobstructed.The second, more disturbing, thing is that the audience gets up to leave. En masse. With perhaps a little less noise than usual, but with still a smattering of talk. To this observer it seemed passing strange. All these people had been prepared to sit through two hours of a profound love story about a misunderstood poet, but couldn’t give another five minutes to listen to one of his poems. It was as if they liked the idea of the suffering poet more than the poems – which seems also to suggest that the same fate would have attended him in the modern age as it did in the nineteenth century. But then perhaps it was simply that they needed desperately to pee (my only criticism of the film was that it was a little over-long, that the drama was drawn out too far, so it could be so)(the women did not agree). Or perhaps that’s what you do when credits roll, get up.Note to Campion: if you want your audience to hear your subject’s poetry then (pace Ricks) keep the images rolling.Incidentally Whishaw did an interview for the Movie Show with David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz where he talked about Keats’s concept of Negative Capability in a most entrancing way. That alone made me want to see the film.

Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal;A man awaits his endDreading and hoping all;Many times he died,Many times he rose again.A great man in his prideConfronting murderous menCasts derision uponSupersession of breath;He knows death to the bone –Man has created death.

a film directed by Isobel Coixet.Few films I have seen recently have achieved so well, so elegantly, a portrait of the complexity of modern life. Ben Kingsley with his powerful nose and his blunt skull is a wonderful canvas on which to paint the feelings of this older man, Kapesh, as he, in turn, meets, becomes involved with, jealous of, and eventually obsessed by Consuela, played by the exquisite, extraordinary Penelope Cruz. Few films have managed better that difficult task of transferring a novel into film (although it needs to be said that there have been several successes in this field recently: Revolutionary Road and The Reader, but two examples).With Elegy, however, even more than these other two, perhaps because it is such a reflective film, a film which centres its attention on the inner person, a film which succeeds so well at mood and moment through the depiction of simple scenes – a man alone in an apartment without the lights on, a squash ball rolling against the court wall – the rather odd, even mean, question comes to mind: why bother?Elegy, of course, is the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel A Dying Animal. The book, which came out only a few years ago, is not large, it is, really, a novella, and was a particularly beautiful object in itself, it’s slip-case dark red, the shade taken from the drapes behind the Modigliani nude which adorned its cover. The title came from the poem by W.B. Yeats. It is a masterful work. It came after Roth had finished the American Pastoral trilogy, the final book of which was The Human Stain. These three novels: that one, I Married a Communist and American Pastoral were notable for a kind of restrained verbosity, an outpouring of words which were, nonetheless, calculated. A Dying Animal is their obverse, their counter-side. It is brief, exact, crude, honest. It might almost be possible to read it in the time it would take to watch the film.Which is why I wonder that someone would bother. The work is already there. Elegy, of course, grants us Penelope Cruz as a siren on whose rocks we can easily imagine ourselves coming aground. But when reading Roth I already had my own siren who looked and felt like herself.It’s not, don’t get me wrong, that I think Elegy was a waste of time. I think it will be out there in the world now, being appreciated by people for years to come. Every one of the actors is excellent, Dennis Hopper, Peter Sarsgaard, the direction is subtle and concise. What I wonder is this: Why can’t film writers make up their own stories? Why do they always have to plunder books? Why do they have to be illustrated novels? Are script-writers so devoid of imagination that they cannot think meaningful ideas up for themselves? Are we as a society so incapable of imagining that people could read that we have to take everything worthwhile in a book and translate it into a picture? Bearing in mind that books so rarely adapt well to cinema if only because films made from books are always going to be a distillation of a certain essence of the story, limited as they are to their prescribed 120 minutes.I think the reason that cinema so often disappoints – failing at what it sets out to achieve – is that, so often, there is an emptiness at the heart of the story. It is a cliché to complain about the proportion of a film’s budget spent on the script, but I refer to more than that: what I mean is that rarely has the script been created specifically for the medium.Cinema, more than any other art, has only the surfaces to deal with and it is one of the miracles of the screen that it can sometimes use these flat planes, these massive two dimensional moving images to point to deeper parts of ourselves. The problem is that the surfaces are so seductive in themselves that more often than not what is being produced are machines for stars to wander about in rather than stories which are designed at their very core to use these tools to pierce the bubble of imagery and touch us. Or even entertain us.The stories are adaptations of stories which moved us when we received them in a completely different form and that form is coded in their DNA. Why should it be otherwise? Consider the disdain with which ‘the novel based on the film’ is regarded. Perhaps, while acknowledging the beauty of Elegy, it might be possible to ask cinema to grow up, to write it’s own tales.

Today, at last, there’s rain. We’ve had no more than an inch since July, here, in Maleny. The creek stopped running and what was left of the grass was crisp to walk on. Now, with the rain, it’s dark brown, as if burned. It’s only been an inch and a half, but the spangled drongos chatter damply in the trees and behind everything is the sound of flowing water. A sense of hope returns.

While looking up the meaning of the word obloquy in the Shorter Oxford (I’m sure everybody knows it, but for those, like me, who’d forgotten it’s: abuse, calumny, slander) I chanced to come upon the word Obambulation, which is described as ‘the action, or an act, of walking about or wandering here and there.’ How much one wishes the President of the United States has a stronger sense of direction….

Here is a novel which opens with some of the sweetest prose you’re likely to find in contemporary Australian fiction. The sentences are simple, constructed with a delicate economy, wasting nothing, drawing us fluently into the tale. The narrator, whose name we only ever hear late in the book – in someone else’s dialogue – has just returned from Venice to his home in Melbourne. His daughter, Clare, living in his house even though she is thirty-eight, has bought no food, he has to go out for milk. Cross, tired, jet-lagged, he goes around the corner to buy supplies and finds new owners have taken up the old dry-cleaners, turning it into a bakery. The shop is full of customers but even with them, with Saturday morning business, there is time for his eyes to meet those of the proprietor, Sabiha.This, then, is to be her story, or rather that of Sabiha and her partner, the oddly named John Patterner, a name which seems like it should be allegorical for something but doesn’t really turn out to be. It is a story, it turns out, that John will tell the narrator over coffee in various locations in Melbourne over the next few months.The book then, is of that type which is referred to in the trade as a pipe and port narrative, the kind where a narrator, who we are made familiar with, a voice we somehow immediately trust – and those first few pages, the first couple of paragraphs give us good reason to – will draw out someone else’s story. In the old days, of Stevenson, Buchan, Conrad (Heart of Darkness is a classic of the genre: we often forget that the tale we hear is told by Marlowe, sitting on the deck of boat out on the Thames, telling the story to friends as darkness falls). In those days the role of the narrator was really just to listen and record, but, being as we are now all modernists, sharply aware of our ironies, the more recent type always also involve the narrator, him or herself. What we observe, we are all obliged to remember, is changed by the observer.Lovesong is a beautiful novel. No qualification. It’s not just the first few pages that are written with economy and care. My concern on finishing it was simply that I wanted more. I’ve not read any of Miller’s other books. I’ve meant to, all through my bookseller days, hand-selling his books on other’s recommendations, I kept saying, I must read that, and it was the simple force of the prose on those first pages that had me at last get around to bringing this one home. I have, however, heard Miller talk on the Bookshow and various other venues and have been delighted by his way of speaking, his capacity as a story-teller. Those interviews were enough to recommend his books on themselves.This Christmas I’ve been glancing through the best reads for 2009 in the magazines and literary sections, on the blogs, and I note that Miller is one of the few Australians who get regularly mentioned. It is disappointing, really, how few they are, I feel like the question should have been, in at least one blog, which Australian novel did you like most this year? If only to jolt writers to read from their own stable, to be engaged in some sort of discussion with each other about what is possible. And it is in that context that I want to ask Miller for more, to suggest that this novel, rather than being good, far the best Australian novel I’ve read all year, could have been great.Let me begin with John Patterner: He stays in Paris for sixteen or seventeen years. (I’m going to try and avoid giving things away here, for the benefit of people who haven’t read the book, but I’m bound to talk about some elements of the plot, so be warned) I find this difficult to believe. Two years, yes, five even, but this is present time we’re living in, aeroplanes leave for Australia every ten minutes from Europe. Did he not take one to see his parents in all that time? Did they not come to see him? Why did he stay? It’s not that it’s impossible that he might have done that, only that what sustained him for so long is unexplained. I feel that, although this is in part his story, I know him at the end of the book no better than I did when he first walked into the café, he has not developed, he has not become a chef or a host, the only way he has changed is to become more worn.The narrator, too, remains unexplored. We find that Ken is a writer, a retired writer (and don’t we all groan a little at that? Do we need another writer talking to us about his experience? No other profession bangs on about how hard their work is in the way writers do. It’s as if because we’ve got the words we feel we have the right to use them about our own process, which I guess is fair enough, but could we perhaps make an agreement, you know, when you join the guild, not to do it in the novels themselves, please.) As the novel progresses, tensions appear in Ken’s household. His home is invaded by another, someone entirely different to him. This is mentioned but then discarded as a line of interest. It is in no way explored.But more importantly the extraordinary tension with arises between John and the narrator twoards the end of the novel is completely glossed over. I remember years ago reading Paul Theroux, that clever curmudgeonly traveller and novelist, paddling around the Pacific Islands in a canoe. At one point, about half way through the book, he’s talking to someone who asks him not to write what it is he’s going to say. Theroux does immediately the opposite. He doesn’t even pause, he just keeps writing. I had to put the book down. I felt sullied to keep reading. I’ve never read a word of his since.There is a similar tension that arises towards the end of this novel – when the two stories, Sabiha and John in Paris, and the narrator and his daughter in Melbourne, begin to come together – that is ignored in the most curious fashion. The ethical problem is pointed at, but then dismissed, because somehow everything is going to be all right, everyone is going to sit down together and eat Tunisian food, and all the threads of the port and pipe narrative are going to be melted into one by the vigour of the spices. We move into a strange happy ever after land.I’m not sure what has happened, but it’s as if the force of the prose, the wonderful cadence of the story-teller, has won over the content. The words have taken over from what they were saying.Should one read as attentively as this? Should one be ungrateful for what is clearly already a gift? I have no answer to that, only to say that had these elements which were flagged been picked up then something extraordinary might have occurred. And what I wonder is if, because we are writing in such a tight little community, desperate to defend our boundaries, we don’t engage in these kinds of conversations with each other about our books and so, as writers, we don’t hear what we need to hear.