LOVESONG
Alex Miller
Allen & Unwin
Hardback $39.99

Last week Wellington author/book reviewer Maggie Rainey-Smith wrote a review on my blog of this title. I was so taken by her review that I decided I should read the book for myself.
I have just put it down having read it in two long sittings and I have to say I feel quite stunned. In the inside cover flap the publisher suggests that Lovesong is "a pitch-perfect novel, a tender and enthralling story about the intimate lives of ordinary people". I couldn't agree more and I am not at all surprised that itis one of the twelve novels long-listed for the 2010 Miles Franklin Award. It is quite simply an outstanding piece of fiction and I loved it.

Most interestingly Lovesong is a novel born out of Miller’s own experiences living as a writer in Paris in the 1970s. After a year, he came back to Melbourne to sell his house with the intention of moving to Paris permanently. But when he got home, he met a young woman and they fell in love. She is now the mother of his children and they are still together.

In Lovesong, Miller gives his main protagonist, Australian John Patterner, the reverse of his own story. John stays and lives a life in Paris after falling in love. Their meeting was pure chance; John is in Paris to visit the famous cathedrals at Chartres, but catches the wrong train and finds himself in the shabby suburb of Vaugirard, known for its working abattoirs. When a sudden storm hits, he seeks shelter in the café Chez Dom, and falls in love with the beautiful young Tunisian waitress, Sabiha.
But there is another story. Melbourne novelist Ken is trying to retire and lives with his 38-year-old daughter.

While he is away in Venice, Sabiha’s pastry shop has opened in his neighbourhood in Carlton. When he goes in, Ken is at once intrigued by Sabiha’s beauty and the sorrow he sees in her eyes. He wonders what is the cause of this sorrow and listens willingly to their story as John unburdens himself. And what a beautifully told stroy it proves to be.

About the author: 

Alex Miller has twice won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s premier literary prize; in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. Conditions of Faith, his fifth novel, won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the 2001 NSW Premiers Literary Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International Literature Award, shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award in 2000, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Miles Franklin Award in 2001. 

He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993. Miller’s eighth novel, Landscape of Farewell, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2008. He was awarded the Manning Clark Cultural Award for an outstanding contribution to the quality of Australian cultural life in 2008, and also the prestigious Chinese literary award for ‘Annual Best Foreign Novel’. 

He lives with his wife in Castlemaine, Victoria.

Footnote;

The full longlist for the 2010 Miles Franklin Award is:

 Figurehead, Patrick Allington; Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey; The Bath Fugues, Brian Castro; Boy on a Wire, Jon Doust; The Book of Emmett, Deborah Forster; Sons of the Rumour, David Foster; Siddon Rock, Glenda Guest; Butterfly, Sonya Hartnett; The People's Train, Thomas Keneally; Lovesong, Alex Miller; Jasper Jones, Craig Silvey; and Truth, Peter Temple. 

What an impressive list, gosh I wouldn't fancy being one of the judges, what a tough decision. The Aussies have great depth in their current novelists. I had thought that Siddon Rock, being a first novel, would have been the rank outsider but that may have changed with it being announced today that the author has won the 2010 Commonwealth Wrters Prize for Best First Book.

The shortlist for the $42,000 Miles Franklin prize, won last year by Tim Winton, will be announced next month.
The winner will be announced on June 22.