HD: While it’s going back into the past of the narrator and Jessica, the main character, there is also that sense of things being played out on the edge of both figures – not a direct engagement in the language and narrative and action and tension in the way that some readers might expect.

AM: That’s true. I mean, how can you write a book about silence and absence? How can you paint a painting, or a series of paintings? How can you deal with silence and absence, whether you‘re a painter or a writer? I know a lot of poets and writers talk about our being a language species, but I don’t think of us that way. I think language is a secondary commodity, secondary element of our lives. The primary elements are this silence and the travelling.

HD: In the novel, you hold in juxtaposition very easily large notions about art and more immediate notions about painting an individual portrait, and at the same time reach through the lives of both major characters into the areas of silence in their own pasts.

AM: I always had the idea, how can you write a big book about absence and silence? Anyway, I suppose I’m a classicist in this sense that I’m not going to subvert the structures to this degree. I’m going to accept them ... Then I kept reconceiving the book, and it wasn’t until the fourth draft that I finally brought it into the first person. Before that it was a balance between the two people: the person who was sitting for the portrait and the person painting the portrait, and trying to find themselves in the process. After all, it was a vocation, a way of life. If the painter couldn’t find himself in the sitter, he was wasting his time. He was going to be depressed about this whole life so he had to struggle on and try to find it. And it was always this ... I couldn’t see until the final draft that it wasn’t a balance. You can’t have that balance. It had to be much more personal. It has to be a closer, personal voice for it to be almost a continuous monologue, almost something he shouted to himself while he was working. The Sitters is this kind of shouted monologue: this man shouting at himself, to himself, listening while he is painting, listening to the sounds of himself painting. The sounds of himself painting really are him and that he and the woman he paints recover themselves with each other. They recover something of themselves that was lost before they met each other. They’re both middle-aged people, and he actually says of himself that he’s at an age where he doesn’t expect to make any more friends.

HD: He imagines himself in her eyes as a decrepit old man.

AM: He imagines this because of vanity. He sees her as somebody a lot younger, and she is, she’s fifty.

HD: I sense an oldness in his self-awareness. It’s a sense that at the beginning he is aware of absences and failures in his life, but recognises in her somehow instinctively that here is something, a person, a presence, whatever, that can send those absences out of him.

AM: Yes. He says at one stage, you can’t experience the feeling that something deeper than normal has been touched by another person, without believing the person has experienced it too. You can be wrong, perhaps they didn’t experience it. But he’s so sensitive about not reaching out beyond himself and his old age and his silence and his own kind of failure.

HD: One of the aspects of the novel that I found fascinating is the notion of portrait painting as hunting, of concealing, of stealing up on things, but also finding strange tracks of yourself. Were you conscious of that hunting metaphor, as a running motif?

AM: Bryony Cosgrove, my editor, was the first person that I know of who noticed it, and she said this is like a sequel to The Tivington Nott ... Fifty years later the boy came to Australia to become an artist. The voices are done completely differently. But she reminded me of that little connection.

HD: I suppose for the reader without any expertise in art or portraiture, the notion of the portrait painter actually stalking some aspect of the self ...

AM: It’s Nina Coltart’s wonderful metaphor, (the psychoanalyst, not the novelist) in a collection of papers published some years ago and called Slouching Toward Bethlehem. l thought of it as the writer’s metaphor – the metaphor of this shy beast, which is the condition, I’d say the illness. The patient presents with certain features – the landscape of the patient – which she has to become familiar with, which she has to explore. She has her theory, a theoretical understanding of her discipline. She says if you cast a net of theory over the condition too soon, you will drag this malformed creature into the light, and the real beast, this shy beast, will slink away, never to be seen. The patient and you both appear to be satisfied with this creature that you drag into the light and the patient will be glad to get away, but nothing will have changed and you will have missed it. I thought it was a wonderful metaphor for the novelist, for myself anyway, working on material that you think is not going to reveal its heart, its guts.

HD: You must stalk it?

AM: Yes. You’re proud of yourself if you go for six months because you’ve accumulated this little bit of text that’s somehow growing. You’ve managed to fool it into coming alive. It’s not really alive, but you’ve fooled it. You’ve applied all your techniques. And then one day you ‘re plodding away and you strike this little spring, and the thing begins to bubble along – you feel really proud of yourself for sticking with it while it was dry. It’s like finding this beast.

HD: It’s interesting because one of the things at the edge of the novel is that much of it is indeed a metaphor for writing.

AM: Writing is a metaphor for art. If art is a metaphor for writing, writing is a metaphor for art. These are our essential secondary occupations.

HD: I was interested in your reference to escaping ‘the trap of the authority of likeness’ in painting and I wondered if we are also talking here of realism in literature.

AM: I would not draw a close parallel. In writing the book, I am not consciously setting up a metaphor. I think metaphors occur. To me they are not interesting if they are consciously set up. To me metaphor is something that has occurred, has arisen out of your work. Much of this book is deeply autobiographical: it’s a reversal which is an autobiographical joke of writer/artist. It’s something that emerged from the nature of my enquiry and the way I related to it.

HD: There’s a moment in The Sitters where Jessica sees the study for the portrait, and she is of course absent. It’s the moment where she expects she’ll see a portrait of herself, but what she sees is an erasure, an absence. It’s quite a turning point in the narrative.

AM: I agree. Portraiture tends to be, on one level, I suppose, associated with lightness and this is something that the book tends to deal with. I guess in writing, you’re constantly made aware of literalism, realism. And realism of course is not literalism. How do you conjure this realism into being? In a sense, absence is more present than presence. Absence has this enormous sense of your reality, your world. Portraiture is always a portrait of yourself. It’s a dead giveaway that the absence is her presence more poignantly than ever. It’s like falling in love with her because in a sense how else can you fall in love with someone without identifying with something in yourself.

HD: If it is a falling in love, it’s that kind of intimacy that only holds in a given situation. So there is a sense of the finiteness of every moment they have, which the novel sustains while reaching out for larger notions of things.

AM: It covers more ground than The Ancestor Game in some ways. It goes into the very still moment. I mean stillness, absence, and silence in some ways are the kinds of qualities that experience reflections and values. You reflect on your experience, on your life. You gather together your impressions and you make a little structure out of them, an experience, a feeling, a form of them. That’s really what the immediacy of human life is. That tiny fragment. The silence, the absence. When you’re with the people that you have to be with all the time, they are the most important people in your life, but in some ways they are also the most abrasive, the most difficult to get on with. All art is this striving for something beyond that. It’s religion, it’s God. I have no doubt about that. I would use those same terms. The people whom I get on with in the priesthood are the priests who don’t see God as a patriarch, or any other ‘-arch’. It’s that longing, that human striving, the journey, the moving on in which you’re never where you’re going to be. You’re always postponing it.

HD: In the novel, you say ‘art is our dispute with reality’.

AM: I see it as not accepting passionately, not accepting the ordinariness of reality, but striving to bring it into being. You may bring it into being for people other than yourself, if you ‘re a writer or a painter, if you write music or design shoes ... it’s part of it. You’re changing people’s reality, modifying it. making a new reality. It’s not just sitting back and saying ‘that’s the way things are’.

HD: It seems to me the techniques of The Sitters are as much about absence and erasure as the content of the novel.

AM: Yes they are. And that was the challenge of the novel. There are two things for me in dealing with something like this – and after writing The Ancestor Game I’m aware of it. In a sense, the first novel I wrote, Watching the Climber on the Mountain, was a found story – and I never challenged it. So I celebrated the story that I’d found. But with The Ancestor Game I had two things operating. One was the challenge of how do these structures operate in culture and the other was the intimacy and immediacy of the people. In The Ancestor Game, the sort of risk in the end that I was aware of taking – and I wasn’t going to do anything about ameliorating it for the reader – was that the three main characters were withheld. As we went into their minds, the richest characters in the book were the memories they had, the memories of other people, the ideas they had of other people in their own histories. Your notion of your mother, for example, your notion of your father, of brothers and sisters, lovers that have gone, or your notion of ancestors beyond that ... and the risk I took was to never give, in a traditional sense, a fullness, richness, roundness, elaborateness of the main characters. I never gave that, in The Ancestor Game, to the three main characters. So they all became connected in a sense by their cultural ancestry, not by their bloodlines.

HD: I’d like to ask you about what I thought was a constant substratum in the novel, when you talk about Western notions of truth, or more particularly Greek notions of the perfect image. It is, you say, ‘the antique error, the error of monotheism, the longing for a fixed truth resident behind the reality, the fallacy of the Western intellectual condition’. The novel is very attentive to the fragments. I suppose I’m coming back to erasure, escape and hunting.

AM: The other thing about absence is that God is always absent, the perfect is always absent, the ultimate is always absent.

HD: And yet we have the illusion that if we just look hard enough we will find the truth or the perfect image ...

AM: Even if we don’t harbour that illusion we pursue the path of perfection.

HD: The ‘antique error’?

AM: Yes. In a sense that’s what it is, perhaps an Eastern thing. It’s the other aspect of writing. There’s the one aspect which is the intimate moment between people, the absolute intimacies that people experience – whereas we were talking before about the portrait in which there is only the absence ... It’s like the portrait of the gallery owner, which is a metaphysical trope. The portraitist remembers the portrait of his agent – a man in a blue suit facing a wall on which there is an enormous portrait of the painter himself. It’s like Plato’s cave, in which you are looking at the shadows rather than the reality.