Alex Miller has twice won the Miles Franklin award (with Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game), as well as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His credentials to win a third are firmly established with an assured and intense new novel Prochownik’s Dream.
    To say this is a book about love is true, but limiting. Miller is back from the rich and broad landscape of Stone
Country to the intense and stifling Melbourne world of Toni Powlett, an artist whose creativity has been blocked since the death of his father four years earlier. Only the joys of life with his wife and young daughter sustain him. As the story of the reawakening of his creative energy unfolds, we move from a slow and uncomfortable engagement in the ‘will he or won’t he’ paint again saga, to a truly gripping account of an artist in the thrall of his muse.
    Only a powerfully gifted novelist could transform this material as artfully as Miller does. The essential self-
absorption any artist needs to dedicate to his craft is richly explored, in painful detail. Toni, and his artistic muse, Marina (the artist wife of his former teacher) are initially unsympathetic characters. Toni is brutally aware of the way his imaginative life is destroying his domestic happiness, but insensitive to the impact his relationship has on his marriage. What transforms the reader’s sympathies is the agonising tension between the daily and the artistic life.
    As absorbing as that tension is, and as satisfying its resolution, what is truly original for me in Prochownik’s
Dream is the unfolding relationship between the artist and his work. Unblocked he may be, but Toni must work with an imaginative intensity to reach the heart and realise the ‘strange inevitability’ of his painting. This is a thoroughly engrossing piece of writing about the process of making art, a revelatory transformation in fact. Such an intimate exploration of that process, and the tension between art and life is rarely essayed in Australian fiction, making Miller’s effort here all the more memorable.

David Gaunt is co-owner of Gleebooks in Sydney

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