The Deal by Alex Miller

Reviewed by Rod McLary

Alex Miller is one of Australia’s finest writers.  Among the many awards he has won, he is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Ancestor Game and Journey to the Stone Country.  And it is in The Ancestor Game where we first meet the protagonist of The Deal – Lang Tzu.  Lang is the exiled Chinese artist from a wealthy family who is a puzzling presence for the novel’s other key characters.  The novel explores themes of cultural displacement and the place of the immigrant in Australian society – especially the Chinese migrants.  It also traverses the question of the creation of self and the tension between fact and fiction in relation to personal history.

These themes are also addressed in The Deal but largely through the perspective of Andy and his wife Jo.  The novel opens in 1942 when Andy is six and he and his father go fishing – but that is only the secondary purpose of the outing.  The primary purpose is ‘sketching the trees and the pond’ [4] together and later making watercolours of the scenes.  It is an idyllic and sensitive image of ‘the father and his son, sharing their love in the silence of concentration’ [4].

But then the narrative leaps ahead in time to 2016 and the first reference to Lang appears as Andy at age eighty questions with hindsight whether ‘Lang was truly the friend I then thought him to be’ [25].

In the major section of the novel ‘The Deal’, Andy is thirty-nine and is teaching English at a school when he meets Lang Tzu for the first time.  And it is in this section that the trajectory of the narrative sets out the gradual progress towards the deal.  A friendship grows between Andy and Lang but with an unspoken question in the background – is the friendship based on an equal status or is it more manipulative than that?  The narrative explores the nature of friendship between men – that ‘special connection’ with another male and the obligations that attend those friendships.  Andy’s wife Jo has a more objective view of the developing friendship and sees Lang more clearly than does Andy.

Through this uncertain friendship, Andy is drawn into Lang’s world – one in which alcohol plays a significant part, where grief for his departed wife Agatha looms large [represented by a portrait where Agatha’s body is facing outwards but she has turned her head and is looking back into the room]; and where his desire, before he dies, to obtain a painting by Walter Sickert reaches an obsessive level.  It is the machinations of Lang’s setting up the deal to obtain what may or may not be a Sickert painting which threaten Andy’s view of himself and whether what he is being drawn into would be seen as unethical by his long-dead father.

Andy’s father reappears in the final and brief section of the book ‘The Time of Ghosts’ where Andy is now eighty-seven; and he recounts a ‘vivid visitation’ by his father who says to him ‘It’s nearly your time, son’ [274].

As always, the author’s use of language is a major strength of the novel.  Whether describing a scene or the innermost thoughts of a character, there is a hypnotic and poetic cadence in the writing which draws the reader deep into the world the author has created.  And The Deal is no exception.  It is beautifully written and the characters of Lang and Andy in particular are beautifully realised.

The Deal is a novel to be savoured.  Well recommended.

The Deal

[2024]

by Alex Miller

Allen and Unwin

ISBN 978 1 7614 7 157 5

$32.99; 279pp

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