This anthology of sixteen essays arises from presentations at a symposium held at Sydney University in May 2011, where Brenda Walker gave the keynote lecture. Her chapter opens with the statement that ‘Alex Miller may be Australia’s greatest living writer.’ Robert Dixon chooses to repeat the claim at the start of his Introduction. It takes no prophetic skills to foresee tens of thousands of book covers coming up with the words blazoned across them, and already I’m offside.

Dixon says the aim of the book is to begin the work of testing the claim, but I can see no point in making it at all. Is Alex Miller ‘greater’ than Les Murray? J.M. Coetzee? David Malouf? And why this fixation on stature and league tables? Good literary criticism should be able to convince us of quality in more specific ways, and should persuade us to pay attention to questions that are more subtle and enigmatic. I’ll admit that once I’d worked my way through the essays in the collection, I was sorry I had got off on the wrong foot, because there is much here that is indeed subtle and attentive, but there remains a lack of effective framing vision, as to who is being addressed and to what purpose.

In the first chapter, ‘The Mask of Fiction’, Miller is a subdued and somewhat reluctant commentator on his own work, and begins with some reflections on fiction as an encounter with ‘the deeper dualities of self’. He has a recurring tendency to refer to the process of writing as one involving a kind of transferred agency: ‘I learned that it is the story that is master of the author, not the author that is master of the story.’ Peter Pierce takes this up in an essay whose title quotes another of Miller’s reversals, ‘My Memory has a Mind of Its Own’, and contemplates the unsettled articulations of past and present in which most of the novels have their genesis.

This unsettling operates on a personal level for the characters in the stories, but has wider resonances in historical events that continue to churn in the substrata of public memory. The massacres of World War II in which European fathers and forefathers are implicated become cross-referenced with massacres that occurred on Australian soil during the colonial era. We are migrants and invaders all, Miller says, and the self must always be haunted by an other from the darkest end of the spectrum of human nature. ‘I saw how we humans were all touched by these evils in ways that ought to prevent us from speaking of them and us. Surely it was all us.’

Massacre is a central theme in the novels, and a dominant line of discussion throughout this anthology. Shirley Walker looks at it in relation to the ‘history wars’ debate, asking ‘What can the novelist do that the historian can’t?’ All the contributors attempt some response to this question, but Raimond Gaita goes furthest – and comes closest to Miller’s own way of putting things – in articulating a view that avoids the political stoush.

Gaita engages in a meditation on Landscape of Farewell (2007), a novel in which the central character is an ageing academic still trying to come to terms with his father’s involvement with extermination programs during the Holocaust. As readers, Gaita says, we are never invited to take the view encapsulated in a line from the Roman dramatist Terence: ‘I am man, nothing human is foreign to me.’ Actually, this quotation seems to me a pretty close parallel with what Miller is saying about ‘them and us’, but Gaita’s instincts are right, I think, in his refusal to stabilise the line of interpretation. Bewilderment is all we can acknowledge in confronting a phenomenon that confounds any common understanding.

Several of the essays deal with themes of otherness and the forms of trauma and epiphany involved in crossing the psychological divide. Miller’s enduring fascination with painting and the disorienting perceptual reversals involved in the sitter–painter relationship is considered in contributions from Brigitta Olubas and Ronald A. Sharp. David Brooks writes about this in relation to the species barrier in human–animal relations. Elizabeth Webby presents an historical perspective on the forms of migrant otherness explored in the novels, and gives some useful chronological bearings on the Chinese-Australian tensions in The Ancestor Game (1992).

If the unconscionable fact of massacre presents us with a cognitive threshold on which we stumble, perhaps it can be approached more obliquely, through narratives that explore diversified forms of geographical, social, and psychological crossing. Elizabeth McMahon writes insightfully about Miller’s ‘geosophical imaginary’, as does Miller himself. A formative experience in the middle phase of his writing career was a trip to the country of the Jangga people, under the guidance of his Aboriginal friend Col McLennan. The novel that emerged from this, Journey to the Stone Country (2002), is based on real-life characters and follows a corresponding pattern of travel into the heart of the darkest story that can be told about the relations between Indigenous and settler peoples in Australia.

Miller’s fiction seems to speak to some craving for mythos on the part of non-Indigenous Australians; it is as if, through the odysseys followed in Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, a new form of citizenship is awarded, one that depends upon a passport to country issued by its original inhabitants. There is a tendency for critical writers to become seduced by the potency of the mythos and to equate this with the power of the novels, but a great theme does not necessarily make a great novel. Brenda Walker (who, aside from her opening gambit, makes some important points) stresses that ‘the literary question is always both the philosophical question of how we know ourselves and the literary-technical question of how we represent knowing ourselves’.

Brigid Rooney is one of the few here who take on the challenge of exploring this. In an illuminating essay that focuses on the narrative and structural techniques involved in managing the layered time frames of the stories, she points to ‘an extraordinary set of temporal and inter-subjective crossings comprised of memories, dreams and fictional texts’. Olubas and Geordie Williamson also engage with questions of literary technique, demonstrating subtleties of observation from which students of creative writing would have much to learn.