Alex Miller, Landscape of Farewell, Allen & Unwin, 2007, ISBN 978 1741 753 752, RRP $35.00, website.
Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet, prefaces her poem cycle Requiem, with a story. During the Stalinist purges she was waiting in line outside the Lubyanka Prison for news of their relatives. A woman recognised her and asked, 'Can you describe this?' She said, 'I can'.
The question and answer resonate because they conjugate all the senses of silence and words. They ask whether Akhmatova has the skill to break silence about what she sees, the courage, the moral right, the experience, the grace that will give eloquence to good intentions, and the confidence that something can be passed on that will survive this apparently all-pervasive silencing.
The question and answer are echoed in Alex Miller's new novel. Its story is simple enough. The narrator is Professor Max Otto. Having lost his wife, he intends to take his own life after giving a valedictory address on the subject of massacres.
But Vita McLelland, a young Australian academic in Hamburg for the conference, attacks his talk. She later persuades him that he has something to live for and that he should visit Australia and meet her uncle, Dougald, an aboriginal elder, in Queensland. Max does so, and accepts the meaning of his own past through entering and finding words for the story of Dougald's great grandfather.
The energy of the novel comes from the paradox that when people of very different cultures come together words fail them, but out of their silence can come deeper words than either could have spoken alone.The protagonists are bound by similar histories through which they are entrapped in silence. Max suspected his father was complicit in Hitler's massacres of the Jews, but could never ask him. Dougald was brutally beaten by his father who suffered inarticulately the loss of his ancestral place in aboriginal society. Max was similarly oppressed by his uncle, who was equally inarticulate in his mad and despairing attachment to the soil.
The heart of the novel lies in its movement from despairing silence to words that lead to acceptance. At its beginning Max is alone after his wife's death, knows that he was never brave enough to ask of his father the one question that mattered to him, and has capitulated to silence. Dougald has never been able to tell the story of