The idea that small decisions can have enormous consequences offers great scope for novelists. Decisions that seem trivial at the time, but in retrospect change everything. If only I had/had not taken that train, picked up the phone, turned left instead of right...
In my November feature book, Autumn Laing, the meeting between the protagonist Autumn and the artist Pat Donlon was the sum of several small decisions - a tip from a receptionist, a missed train, an invitation to dinner. The consequences are both thrilling and devastating.
Pat and Autumn are soon caught up in a torrid affair, bound by a powerful lust for each other and for art. They almost simultaneous attract and repel each other. Pat can be arrogant, cruel, sneering and consumed by an ugly ambition, yet Autumn is compelled to help him realise his gift. She yearns to collaborate with him in creating a new and uniquely Australian form of modern art, unhindered by the European style and techniques dominating the local art scene at the time.
Australian art is one of author Alex Miller's great loves, and it shows. Some of the best passages in the book come when his cast of intelligent characters debate ideas about why art matters, the "untouched silence" at its heart and what it means to be an artist. "Art is a woman," says Autumn to Pat at their first meeting. "She wants everything or nothing. She sees everything else as betrayal."
While the story of Autumn and Pat has many parallels with the real-life story of artist Sidney Nolan and arts patron Sunday Reed, the characters are fully realised and firmly Miller's own. Miller beautifully captures Pat's single-minded determination to make art his way. Pat paints in an obsessive fervour, as if trying to capture an image "as fugitive as a dream on waking", and delights when "educated people" are rendered speechless by his work. His hunger and torment and the intensity of the passion between himself and Autumn are convincingly realised.
