The passage of love by Alex Miller

Most members found The Passage of Love was interesting to read, despite being more than 500 pages long. They liked the way Alex Miller wrote and the storyline was "wild and out there" enough to hold their interest to the end. The book is semi-autobiographical, covering 15 years of award-winning Australian author, Alex Miller's life, and how he became an author.

However, members were intrigued as to how much of it is really true - how much of the main character, Robert Croft, is Alex Miller - since the author's relationship with his first wife in the book is quite bizarre.

We were puzzled by the opening section of the book which features the author visiting prison for a book reading and discussion. One of the inmates points out the author's fascination with absent mothers in his books. Members couldn't really work out what this added to the book - unless it was simply that the author thought the book would be discussed by book clubs such as ours!

Robert Croft (or Alex Miller) does describe an incident in his childhood when his father placed him in a children's home for a week while his mother was having her second child. His father does appear to suffer from PTSD after the war and the author expresses concern he has inherited his temper. But this is not played out in the book, beyond one strange episode. The fact that Croft (Miller) left for Australia at the age of 16 might indicate an estrangement with his parents but later in the book when he takes his wife to meet them on her insistence there is a relatively warm reunion. There are cultural influences in the home, too, such as the father's love of poetry, so hardly a childhood afflicted by poverty and lack of stimulus.

The author describes how on coming to Australia Robert Croft (Alex Miller) leads the life of a jackaroo working on cattle stations in north Queensland for four years. During this time he meets Frankie, an aboriginal stockman and this awakens in him an understanding of the injustices and inequality between black and white. His first book is an attempt to write about this but he ultimately fails. He never makes any attempt to renew the connection with Frankie nor do anything further about highlighting what he has experienced.

Most of the book covers the period when Croft (Miller) arrives almost destitute in Melbourne and eventually meets up with and marries Lena, a well educated and privileged young woman. The couple marry on the insistence of Lena's mother after they spend the night together. Yet a more mis-matched couple could hardly be found in literature.

Lena is clearly mentally unstable, anorexic and taken to following wild impulses in her attempts to find the true purpose of her life. Despite this, the author remains loyal to her and supports her. It is primarily the male friends in the author's life who encourage him to go to university and consider writing. Lena retains a cowboy fantasy about him.

Eventually, in order for Alex to establish a place to write, and initially for Lena to fulfil the romantic illusion of becoming a self sufficient country woman, they buy a rundown grazing property at Aruluen in rural Victoria and live under primitive conditions to eke out a living. Of course, the farm must be worked and it is Alex to whom the tasks fall, leaving less time for his writing. Lena eventually follows her creative urges to join an art school back in Melbourne, but she doesn't want the farm sold and leaves the author to struggle on with keeping the farm going on his own.

He is eventually rescued by a friend who visits him and points out the manifest error of his ways. They become lovers and he follows her to Paris. By this time, he is writing publishable work and his writing career really begins.

One member was sad that to fund his and Lena's separate creative endeavours and adventures, the property was apparently sold and divided into blocks for a peri urban residential estate. The beauty of the landscape and wildlife which they both drew on creatively during their time on the farm was thereupon apparently lost.

Who is Alex Miller?

Alex Miller, 83, is an Australian novelist, who was born in London to a Scottish father and an Irish mother.

He worked as a farm labourer in Somerset before migrating on his own to Australia at the age of 16, and working as a ringer in Queensland and a horse breaker in New Zealand.

He studied at night school to gain university entrance and graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1965 with an Arts degree in English and History.

In 1975 his first short story was published. Between 1986 and 1997 he taught writing courses at TAFE and La Trobe University before starting to write full-time in 1998.

He has written 11 novels and has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for The Ancestor Game (1993) and Journey to the Stone Country (2003). The Ancestor Game also won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. He was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012 for his body of work.

He lives in regional Victoria with his wife, Stephanie.