A review of Lovesong by Alex Miller

I wrote in glowing terms about Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell a couple of years ago. He is a mature writer with an ability to get beneath the skin of his characters, moving beyond the instinctive.

Little did I realise at the time that Landscape was meant to be his farewell as an author. Yet it seems he was incapable of giving up writing.

in some ways he chronicles that journey in Lovesong. The narrator in the book is also a writer, wrestling with his sense of place and identity once he stops writing:

During my life I had acquired no skills for not working, and I soon found that not writing a book was harder than writing one.

The narrator becomes intrigued by the story of a man, John Patterner, whose beautiful and exotic wife Sabiha, has opened a pastry shop nearby. There is a sadness behind her eyes, and slowly the narrator unwinds from John the tangled and tragic story of his wife, via a series of confessions:

But isn’t that what all stories are? Confessions? Aren’t we compelled to tell our stories by our craving for absolution?

While one theme is the narrator’s yearning to capture story; the novel is also about a woman’s desire to bear a child, and about love and loss and desperation, and about John’s desire for his life to bear some meaning.

In this way, it is a novel that resonates with universal themes. It is full of little nuggets of description and wisdom from a writer who has experienced a full life.

For example, the narrator describes loving his wife over a long period of time... “To the end. Which was the best of it. It was only I who could still see her beauty at the end.”

There is a depth here which is rare; a writing of the richness of relationships, as well as the frailties.

In the end, Sabiha justifies a terrible choice that destroys many lives. She does it by putting her needs above others, by seeing it as an act of vengeance, by not seeing the other as a person, by planning it carefully without emotion, by spiritualising it as destiny.

These are all ways we seek to escape from the broken paths lying before us. In the end, the consequences overwhelm her excuses. She has succeeded at getting what she wanted, but at great cost.

However, John and Sabiha’s story never overwhelms us, because the narrator is constantly reminding us that he is telling their story:

My view of this is that when someone tells you a story they give it to you. The story is their gift. It becomes yours... They place the story in your trust. And they do it because they need to do it. They want their story to go out from them, and be somewhere else, with their listener. Just as a writer wants to rid himself of his writing and get it to a reader.

There are some very interesting ideas here about storytelling and writing and reading. Moreover, one cannot help but draw the parallel between Sabiha’s choice and the narrator’s. Was the story given? Or taken? Just as Sabiha took what she wanted from someone else.

To what lengths will we go to in justifying the actions we take?

On the other hand, I am taken with this idea of story as gift, of finding ourselves in other people’s stories, or in the true telling of our own story.

Jesus used stories to teach and warn and entice, and to help us discover our hearts.

Maybe that is partly why I love reading books so much. However, I would lose a sense of perspective on my true self if I didn’t compare what I read with the true story of Jesus.

In an interesting device, the narrator is only named in the final pages... Ken. Until then, he has been someone with some history revealed to the reader, but not named. The naming comes as a revelation. John names him as he comments that Ken knows everything about him, but he knows nothing about Ken.

That is where there is a difference between authors and God. While God knows everything about us, he has also revealed so much about himself in his Word. I create a new story with God, weaving in with others, making sense in his meta-narrative. As Nouwen points out, we must receive the gift of God’s story, and make room for it in our lives.