Alex Miller has, for the three decades since the publication of his first fiction, been an exemplary author of the second kind. This is not to say that his themes – anger over the treatment of Indigenous peoples at white Australia’s hands, appalled empathy with European Jewry’s sufferings during the twentieth century, fascination with artists and the visual arts, regret for the loss of certain ways of being in the world once grounded in rural or peasant cultures – are not universal in scope or political in implication. Yet, as Miller’s new novel, his twelfth, reminds us, the wider world is illuminated in his work by reference to the intimate and the local. The Passage of Love is a novel that explicitly revisits aspects of Miller’s life with the aim of shedding light on subjects beyond its biographical orbit.

Ostensibly, Miller’s writing career began in Melbourne, at the age of twenty-six, after he graduated from the University of Melbourne. It is these years, and the long and arduous passage from would-be writer to published author that followed them, which provide the raw material for what is surely his longest fiction to date. It has the epic sprawl of some old-school Bildungsroman and, indeed, Thomas Mann is name-checked early on, when a German-Jewish émigré gives the narrator, a young, working-class South Londoner named Robert Crofts, a copy of Mann’s Doctor Faustus.

That novel, of course, tells the story of a composer who makes a deal with Mephistopheles, trading the possibility of romantic passion for two and half decades in which he is able to create music of uncommon brilliance. The Passage of Love inverts that narrative. Robert Croft’s story is one in which the would-be author gives up writing for over two decades in order to care for the woman with whom he becomes personally entangled. It is the story of a man whose hunger for artistic creation is stymied by a flawed marriage: a sacred, rather than a diabolical compact, but no less implacable for that.

So much of Robert Croft’s story accords with that of Miller’s own, however, that it is difficult to shake the sense of pure memoir. A handsome young ringer, based for some years (since his teenage emigration from the United Kingdom) in Queensland’s Gulf Country, turns up in the grand Victorian capital with little more than the hat on his head. There he submits to the daily discipline of paid manual labour, feverish with inchoate desires and barely smothered rage. It seems he is suffering from ontological, as much as sexual, frustration.

While the latter is soothed via a brief affair with an older woman, a free-living socialist, the former is addressed only when an academic, an economist at the University of Melbourne, takes an interest in Robert’s case. In two consequential interventions, the scholar first encourages the younger man to enrol at university, then introduces Robert to the woman who will become his wife. On paper, Lena Soren is a paragon of middle-class rectitude: a former head girl of Methodist Ladies College who plays piano and spends her days employed as a social worker. In truth, she is a wild and unruly spirit. Lena is immediately drawn to Robert, seeing him as the hero who will release her from the prison of probity she inhabits.

There is more than a touch of domestic melodrama, particularly in these early sections. Robert does not free Lena so much as get locked up alongside her. Having initiated an affair with Robert, the young woman admits as much to her mother, who exerts her class prerogatives to insist on a shotgun wedding. Robert is still young enough to bully and retains just enough forelock-tugging from his Anglo upbringing. Besides, he is in lust, if not quite in love, with Lena. Reluctantly he accedes to the Soren family’s fait accompli.

What follows is a slow-burning catalogue of marital breakdown enlivened only by Miller’s trademark prose, limpid and grave and stately in progression, each sentence fragment tongue-and-grooved with the next:

...when Lena looked into his eyes, what he saw was not the happiness of a bride, but a kind of sorrow, a longing and a melancholy that lay deep within her, as if the person she really was, her own person, that secret person not displayed in the portrait but left blank, would be required to fight its way to the surface from the suffocating confinement of this other existence.

After Lena’s mother dies, whatever psychic bandages are left holding her together fray and break. She runs off to Italy, obliging Robert to follow. The years to come find them based in Sydney, where the tyro author makes his first, halting efforts at a novel, based on his Queensland experiences, and then Canberra, where he takes a job as a public servant and abandons his tentative vocation altogether. It is only when the couple make one last-ditch effort to repair their relationship, by moving to a remote bush block in the Lower Araluen valley in rural New South Wales, that the creative urge rises in Robert once again. That said: it is only the final breakdown of their marriage that permits a definitive shift.

Alex Miller (photograph by John Tsiavis)If there is weakness in The Passage of Love, it resides in the closeness between life and art. Miller married Anne Neil in 1961; the relationship eventually failed. The places where Robert and Lena lived and work rhyme strongly with those where Alex Miller and his first wife lived and worked, also. Everything down to the title of his first published short story appears here in unamended form. This knowledge creates in the aware reader a sense of uncomfortable, even voyeuristic proximity. In an autobiographical essay published in a 2011 monograph on Miller’s work, the author admits discomfort when it comes to memoir: ‘who but the self-deceived would claim to be able to write with moral detachment about themselves?’

Yet this is a novel, which, inevitably, applies its creator’s weight to the thumb-scales of judgement. The other voices it contains or echoes, whether they belong to the Aboriginal stockman, Frankie, who was Robert’s first friend and the inspiration for his primary fictional efforts, or to Martin and Birte Bloch, cultured survivors of the Shoah based on Max and Ruth Blatt, Miller’s first and most significant literary supporters, or to Lena herself, a woman who rises from these pages damaged and emotionally absent, suffer from an unwarranted propinquity.

Miller’s story is long, intense, and vital, even as it notates the years of drift and unhappiness that characterise the author’s extensive prehistory as a writer. But it is desultory in the usual cleansing rituals of contemporary autofiction. Karl Ove Knausgaard, to take a major recent example, is careful to foreground the truth content of his writings from the outset – he insists his literary productions are transcriptions of real event – it is then up to us how fictive we take them to be. A few interstitial chapters, told from the present by an author now deep in the autumn of life, indulging in retrospective admiration and guilt, are the only self-conscious buffer between living novelist and fictional mask that The Passage of Love has to offer. The virtues of honesty and artistic remove it claims as fiction can feel threadbare as a result.

This criticism is one that should, however, be modulated by what we know of Miller’s other borrowings from real life. We revere earlier novels by him, such as The Tivington Nott (1987) and Conditions of Faith (2000), despite the degree to which they are grounded in real persons and events. It may be that time and distance will allow us to see The Passage of Love as one more in the grand continuum of Alex Miller’s fictionalised self-examinations. With such perspective, we may see the author’s more immediate presence fade, overgrown by those universal themes first planted in the soil of the self.