fiction
Andrew Riemer
Alex Miller
Conditions of Faith
Allen & Unwin $32.95hb, 349pp
1 86508 308 9
Nevertheless, Conditions of Faith seems to be informed by much more complex 'ideas'. It reaches back to the world of The Portrait of a Lady, Madame Bovary, and even Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. I do not mean to imply that Miller was consciously borrowing from such seminal works of the nineteenth century, yet his novel clearly reflects the aesthetic, ethical and social preoccupations that generated those master-works, and much else besides.
The time is in the early 1920s. Emily Stanton, the daughter of an influential Melbourne Professor of Engineering, has recently completed her university studies with a brilliant degree in the history of the ancient world. She meets Georges Elder, a half-French, half-Scottish construction engineer -- who dreams of building concrete causeways across Port Phillip Bay -- a representative of a Belgian firm bidding for the contract to erect Sydney's long-planned, eagerly awaited Harbour Bridge.
Emily and Georges fall in love, marry and set sail for Paris. At first she is exhilarated by the life they lead in a tiny attic flat with a tantalising view of the Invalides. Before long, however, Emily's satisfaction begins to fray. Georges is remote, distracted by the endless columns of figures he is preparing for the tender for the great bridge. His mother and aunt, immured in a damp house in Chartres and surrounded by the narrow pieties of a cathedral town, seem to resent the intruder from across the seas. Even in Paris, Emily finds greater affinity with Antoine, Georges's friend, the son of French colonists in Tunisia and (as Emily comes to realise) a homosexual. A chance encounter with a young priest on her first visit to Chartres unlocks unsuspected emotional, sexual and even perhaps intellectual potentialities.
And so this fine novel follows a trajectory that leads it into experiences and possibilities of life of a kind that late-nineteenth-century novels habitually explored. Like Isabel Archer, Emily is an independent-minded woman from a new world who is both enchanted and imprisoned by the ceremonies of the old. As with Emma Bovary, though without the least trace of cheap sentimentality, her longings and desires bring her into conflict with a narrow, hypocritical and fundamentally provincial society. In Tunisia, where she is sent to recuperate from an illness contracted in the early months of her pregnancy, she discovers -- like Dorothea Brooke -- the allure of the almost exclusively male world of scholarship and antiquarian research.
And like Dorothea too, she searches for her own Key to All Mythologies (in a sense) through her fascination with Vibia Perpetua, an early martyr (or perhaps independent woman) whose fate was commemorated by Tertullian. Finally, like Anna Karenina, though for very different reasons, Emily is forced to confront the possibility of abandoning her child.
I have drawn attention to these echoes and resonances not to imply that there is anything derivative in Miller's novel, but to suggest that it is, in an entirely legitimate manner, essentially backward-looking, drawing together concerns and preoccupations largely ignored by contemporary writers. For that reason, it seems to me, the period in which the novel is set is highly significant. Conditions of Faith (like Middlemarch) looks back three generations or so, to a past recent enough in some ways, yet already a chapter of history. Its principal axes -- notions of modernity implicit in Bradfield's dream of a bridge spanning Sydney's harbour and the legacy of antiquity; Australia and Europe; the imperatives of social life, religion marriage and sexual orthodoxy and the desire for independence and self-determination -- trace the ambiguous and perplexing conditions of faith, so to speak, of our parents' or grandparents' time, out of which ours emerged.